Book Review | Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

"Errand requiring immediate attention. Come."

The note was on vellum, pierced by the talons of the almost-crow that delivered it. Karou read the message. 'He never says please', she sighed, but she gathered up her things.

When Brimstone called, she always came.

In general, Karou has managed to keep her two lives in balance. On the one hand, she's a seventeen-year-old art student in Prague; on the other, errand-girl to a monstrous creature who is the closest thing she has to family. Raised half in our world, half in 'Elsewhere', she has never understood Brimstone's dark work - buying teeth from hunters and murderers - nor how she came into his keeping. She is a secret even to herself, plagued by the sensation that she isn't whole.

Now the doors to Elsewhere are closing, and Karou must choose between the safety of her human life and the dangers of a war-ravaged world that may hold the answers she has always sought.

***

Those of you who know me will know, no doubt, that I am not what you might call a fan of paranormal romance.

In fact in many ways, I think the genre has been a plague on all our houses. I mean, sure... a few more folks are card-carrying readers now than there would otherwise be, thanks to Twilight, and the continuing affairs of Sookie bloody Stackhouse, and so on and so forth. That alone would be cause for celebration, had not the success of these series been such that countless thousands of me-too texts arose overnight, as if from the grave. But the sad truth is there's only room on bookstore shelves for so many spines, and money in our wallets - not to mention the bank vaults of publishers - for so many new releases, practically every one of which is touted as the Next Big Thing, until it isn't.

Even then, if paranormal romance was a genre of literature in which quality seemed to me in the least meaningful, I wouldn't mind. But let's face it: Stephanie Meyer is terrible writer - even Stephen King thinks she's a waste of space - and she's sold a metric googolplex of books. If hers is the bar other paranormal romance writers must aspire to, then it is little wonder that the genre is so rife with rubbish.

Rife... but not entirely overrun.

Though it is the first of her works to be published here in the UK, Daughter of Smoke and Bone is actually Laini Taylor's fourth novel, and her mastery of the craft is on show from word one:

Walking to school over the snow-muffled cobbles, Karou had no sinister premonitions about the day. It seemed like just another Monday, innocent but for its essential Mondayness, not to mention its Januaryness. It was cold, and it was dark - in the dead of winter the sun didn't rise until eight - but it was also lovely. The falling snow and the early hour conspired to paint Prague ghostly, like a tintype photograph, all silver and haze. (p.1)

Insofar as it demonstrates the ineffable prettiness of Taylor's prose, her wry, knowing sense of humour and the uniqueness of this series' setting, this single paragraph serves to set Daughter of Smoke and Bone apart from the masses. And it only gets better.

Karou is a fantastic protagonist. It's par for the course, of course, that she's smart and funny and talented, not to mention stubborn, beautiful and brave, but Karou is far from picture perfect; she can be cruel, and she is often frivolous. She makes the same mistakes we all would - for love, for friends, for family - and pays for them in kind. Above all else, however, what appealed to me about her character is that she is resolutely not some innocent specimen to be despoiled, or won by some handsome man/monster as if she were a prize.

She had been innocent once, a little girl playing with feathers on the floor of a devil's lair. She wasn't innocent now, but she didn't know what to do about it. This was her life: magic and shame and secrets and teeth and a deep, nagging hollow at the center of herself where something was most certainly missing. (p.45)

Indeed, something most certainly is. There's something off about Karou, you see. Everyone who knows her knows it - and it goes beyond the secrets she must keep... the double life she must live. Daughter of Smoke and Bone is about Karou's discovery of that absent aspect of her character: the secret piece that will explain the puzzle that is her existence, betwixt here - in our world - and Elsewhere, where dwells the demon that is her adopted daddy.


Brimstone is not your usual father figure. More beast than man - yet more a man than most - while he can be found behind any number of doors in our world, Brimstone is not of our world, but another:

It wasn't like in the storybooks. No witches lurked at crossroads disguised as crones, waiting to reward travelers who shared their bread. Genies didn't burst from lamps, and talking fish didn't bargain for their lives. In all the world, there was only one place humans could get wishes: Brimstone's shop. And there was only one currency he accepted. It wasn't gold, or riddles, or kindness, or any other fairy-tale nonsense, and no, it wasn't souls either. It was weirder than any of that.

It was teeth. (p.33)

And what of Karou? If she too is from Elsewhere, then why does she not have the aspect of an eagle, or a fox, or a crocodile, like her father? If she is from here and not there, though, why did Brimstone take her in, seventeen years ago? For what purpose does she travel each week to the darkest corners of the world, to collect the teeth of dead things from merchants who want Brimstone's wishes for their troubles? Is she a creature of light, or dark? An angel, or a demon? An omen of war, or the promise - the hope - of peace?

If you're at all familiar with the genre of this novel, I'm sure you'll have a good guess at the ready... and you wouldn't be entirely amiss in your imaginings. In short: if you don't do patience, then don't do Daughter of Smoke and Bone. I'd say the same if you aren't prepared to give paranormal romance a chance, because this is absolutely that. Rest assured, however, that though there are moments when one wishes Taylor would just get on with what seems inevitable, given the genre's tendencies, she is, as it transpires, ever a step or ten ahead, and in the interim her prose is such a wonder that the getting there is no chore.

Would that I could talk to you about where Daughter of Smoke and Bone goes, for that is where it truly comes into its own. Sadly, much of what is remarkable about this justifiably lauded novel is discovered only in its magnificent last act, and these are revelations I wouldn't dream of ruining for those among you who are yet to have the pleasure. Suffice it to say that appealing eau de la urban fantasy of the sections of Daughter of Smoke and Bone set in entrancing Prague - which will lure you in "like the mythic fey who trick travelers deep into forests until they're lost beyond hope" (p.183) - are brilliantly substituted for high fantasy of the highest variety.

In style and in substance, Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a breathtaking creation. Nominal in its premise, perhaps, but truly beautifully wrought; Laini Taylor's latest is easily ten times the book Twilight is, was, or ever will be.

Alas, I doubt that it will sell a tenth as many copies.

(It should.)

***

Daughter of Smoke and Bone

by Laini Taylor

UK Publication: September 2011, Hodder & Stoughton

US Publication: September 2011, Little, Brown

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

Video Game Review | Resistance 3, dev. Insomniac Games

Once upon a time, Resistance meant something.

In the early years of the PS3, when it looked disturbingly like Sony were yet again fighting an uphill battle, not to mention losing - to the Xbox 360, of course, but also to the Wii, and this when the Wii was at its most potent - Resistance: Fall of Man was a call to arms of sorts. A Halo-killer, they said, with bits of Bioshock in... and who in their right mind wouldn't want that?

Alas, like Killzone before it, and again after it, the first Resistance was crushed under the not-inconsiderable weight of expectations. It was no Halo, no Call of Duty, and assuredly no Bioshock, but for a few text and audio logs your player character - Nathan Hale, a one-man army with a strict sell-by date - could pick up.

For all that, though, Resistance: Fall of Man was alright. It was very much an Insomniac joint: coming as it did from the developers of Ratchet & Clank, it had a neat, arcadey feel to it, a bunch of interesting weapons you could and should switch between on the fly, and a concept (aliens invade) which, if it was a little overfamiliar - and it was - then at least it was a new spin on an old story. The alt-history of the early 50s Insomniac Games' creative team cobbled together was a familiar thing twisted almost beyond recognition. It looked the part, played the part, but its various successes aside, it could never realistically have hoped the part was be any more meaningful than any other understudy's.

With Resistance 2, in 2008, Insomniac only dug in deeper. This was exactly the wrong thing for it to do. Nobody needed yet another wartime shooter, and what had made Resistance: Fall of Man stand out was largely absent its rushed sequel. It was a bigger thing, oh yes, but very far from a better thing. The Resistance franchise was in the end its own worst enemy, stripping its own corpse - how ghastly! - of the very things which had made it distinct... if only ever slightly so.

Colour me utterly bloody beside myself with surprise, then, at what I'm about to say, because Resistance 3 is easily the best Resistance yet. Third time's the charm, right?

It's not hard to see the benefits wrought of the extra year Insomniac took developing this second sequel: in everything from the stunning lighting to the pared-down and markedly more effective narrative, by way of the myriad refinements applied to the twitchy, free-for-all gunplay returning from the original Resistance rather than the more directed experience that (in part) made Resistance 2 such a boob. Resistance 3 is Resistance done right, finally, and the best argument I've seen in recent years for taking whatever time it takes to do something justice, instead of shitting out an installment every holiday season come hell or high water.

Humanity is old news, in Resistance 3. Only a scant fraction of the population has made it through the Chimeran attack initiated in the first game, none unscathed, and the efforts of infected man of action Nathan Hale in the sequel served to quicken the fall of man, rather than stop it. Now even his heroic hardships are of a bygone era, because Nathan Hale is gone: shot dead, in fact, by Corporal Joseph Capelli, which is to say the player character of Resistance the third.

Joseph is one of a few survivors eking out an existence underground in Haven, Oklahoma, where Resistance 3 begins. When their hideaway is inevitably discovered, Joseph's wife Susan begs him to leave her and their son, Jack, in order to go with Dr. Fyodor Malikov to the Chimeran tower atop the ruins of New York, where the scientist believes the wormhole gradually freezing the entire surface of the earth can be closed. Eventually, the former Corporal obliges and sets sail for the Big Apple, but not before Susan has implied that she would pick Jack's safety over Jospeh's any day of the week.

Resistance 3's story allows it a few moments of spectacle, of gargantuan alien grandeur or appalling human horror - best exemplified by a long level that put me in mind of nothing so much as that one time I went to Ravenholm - but by and large the narrative of this finely-honed return to form is a more personal affair than those loosely chronicled in either of its predecessors. And it hits home all the harder for that, imbuing the moment-to-moment experience of Resistance 3 - which is to say left trigger to aim, right trigger to shoot, rinse and repeat... as per the formula of every other shooter, but faster, and more fun for it - with precious import on the small scale as well as the impossibly large.

A darker, more intimate, and ultimately more meaningful sequel to a should have been and a could have been respectively, Resistance 3 simply is, and it is, at last, no longer the least of all the franchises scrapping over the FPS crown. Polished to a sparkling sheen, it is a gorgeous thing bolstered by fundamentally satisfying core mechanics inspired as much by Ratchet & Clank as Call of Duty, and though neither of those series are under any threat from Resistance 3, with this third iteration, Insomniac are finally fighting the good fight.

Shame, then, that if reports are to be believed, this will be the studio's last dalliance with a franchise only now hitting its stride. No doubt Resistance will power on into the next generation, and perhaps beyond, but without Insomniac at the helm, who knows what fate may await the last remnants of humanity? Them, or us.

The Scotsman Abroad | Floor to Ceiling Zombies

I couldn't be happier than to have a guest post up over at the one-stop shop that is Floor to Ceiling Books while Amanda's AFK, sunning herself back to full blogging capacity at some undisclosed location in the United States... leaving the lunatics to run the asylum!

 

Anyway, I thought you all might be interested. It's my review of The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan: the first of a moderately popular trilogy of books for young adults which aim to do for zombies and horror what The Hunger Games did for survival sf.

 

I didn't even hate it!

 

But then, I didn't adore it half as much as I did and do its covers...

 

Here's a bit from the review: 

 

"I can forgive a beautiful wordsmith much, and Carrie Ryan is that, at times. To wit, writers with such admirable aspirations often fall afoul of prose so minutely considered as to seem overwrought - some might say I should know! - yet there is a terrific undercurrent of the unspoken to Ryan's dialogue, while the understated comes naturally to her exposition. Her imagery is often haunting; her lexicon evocative, and absolutely appropriate to the tale, which is to say one of solitude and belief, love and trust."

 

If you've a mind to read more about The Forest of Hands and Teeth - and it's a book I would recommend, albeit with certain reservations - please do click on through for more where that came from.

 

But I'm left with a question. Do I read on immediately, by way of The Dead-Tossed Waves? Or do I give another recently or about-to-be completed series a shot, like the Leviathan books by Scott Westerfeld, or N. K. Jemisin's Kingdoms trilogy?

Help a fella out with your recommendations, readers?

Books Received | The BoSS for 25/09/11

In The BoSS this week: a book Patrick Rothfuss wishes he had written... what must be the shortest thing ever to bear Peter F. Hamilton's name... a selection of stories of the unpossible... one tome... and a book that's been likened to Deliverance.

Yes, the film. Curious and curiouser!

So. Shall we?

***

Manhattan In Reverse

by Peter F. Hamilton

Vital Statistics

Published in the UK

on 07/10/11

by Macmillan

Review Priority

4 (Pretty Bloody Likely)

The Blurb: A collection of short stories from the master of space opera; his first in thirteen years.

Peter F Hamilton takes us on a journey from a murder mystery in an alternative Oxford in the 1800s to a brand new story featuring Paula Mayo, Deputy Director of the Intersolar Commonwealth’s Serious Crimes Directorate. Dealing with intricate themes and topical subjects, Manhattan in Reverse sees this bestselling author at the top of his game.

My Thoughts: How strange it is to hold in one's hands a book by Peter F. Hamilton that isn't an almighty door-stopper! Strange, but good strange, I should say; not bad. I was reading through the Commonwealth novels last year, but I'm afraid I rather stalled on the second of them, though I'd very much enjoyed my time with the first. 

Manhattan in Reverse, then, given its markedly more modest stature - only 250-odd pages, all told - should be the perfect opportunity for me to get back into the swing all things Peter F. Hamilton.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone

by Laini Taylor

Vital Statistics

Published in the UK

on 29/09/11

by Hodder & Stoughton

Review Priority

5 (A Sure Thing)

The Blurb: Errand requiring immediate attention. Come.

The note was on vellum, pierced by the talons of the almost-crow that delivered it. Karou read the message. "He never says please," she sighed, but she gathered up her things. 

When Brimstone called, she always came. 

In general, Karou has managed to keep her two lives in balance. On the one hand, she's a seventeen-year-old art student in Prague; on the other, errand-girl to a monstrous creature who is the closest thing she has to family. Raised half in our world, half in Elsewhere, she has never understood Brimstone's dark work - buying teeth from hunters and murderers - nor how she came into his keeping. She is a secret even to herself, plagued by the sensation that she isn't whole.

Now the doors to Elsewhere are closing, and Karou must choose between the safety of her human life and the dangers of a war-ravaged world that may hold the answers she has always sought.

My Thoughts: Blurbed by the beast of a thousand beards, Patrick Rothfuss himself, and highly recommended to me by Amanda of Floor-to-Ceiling Books, Daughter of Smoke and Bone is being touted as the Next Big Thing in fantasy... 

... given all of which, my hopes for it are high, setting certain expectations which the promising synopsis above does nothing to dissuade. Fingers crossed it's all that!

Unpossible and Other Stories

by Daryl Gregory

Vital Statistics

Published in the US

on 01/11/11

by Fairwood Press

Review Priority

4 (Pretty Bloody Likely)

The Blurb: The short stories in this first collection by critically acclaimed writer Daryl Gregory run the gamut from science fiction to contemporary fantasy, with a few stories that defy easy classification. His characters may be neuroscientists, superhero sidekicks, middle-aged heroes of children’s stories, or fantatics spreading a virus-borne religion, but they are all convincingly human.

Says Nancy Kress, author of Steal Against the Sky: "Facts do not begin to describe Daryl. Not describe him, not contain him, not constrain him. Both in person and in his fiction Daryl breaks the paltry bonds of fact; they cannot hold him. Read these stories for their human truths, for their inventiveness, for their verve. Most of all, read them for your own pleasure."

My Thoughts: From The Uninnocent to Unpossible, eh?

Of Daryl Gregory's three novels, I'm ashamed to admit I've only read his latest, Raising Stony Mayhall. But it was, in short, brilliant. (Stay tuned for a full review in the not-too-distant.) I am thus positively gagging to get started on this, his first short story collection, out from Fairwood Press in either October or November... I'm not 100% sure which.


In the interim, do check out this discussion about the incredible cover art, via your abominable friend and mine, what blogs at Stomping on Yeti.

A Single Shot

by Matthew R. Jones

Vital Statistics

Published in the UK

on 15/09/11

by Mulholland Books

Review Priority

4 (Pretty Bloody Likely)

The Blurb: Anyone's life can change in an instant. In Matthew F. Jones's acclaimed novel, one man's world is overturned with a single shot.

Trespassing on what was once his family's land, John Moon hears a rustle in the brush and fires. But instead of the deer he was expecting, he finds the body of a young woman, killed by his stray bullet. A terrible dilemma is made worse when he stumbles upon her campground - and the piles of drugs and money concealed there.

Moon makes his choice: he hides the corpse, and takes the cash. His decision will have consequences he can neither predict or control.

My Thoughts: Apparently this book was huge in America, where it's been available for decades. Decades, I tell you!

Well... better late than never, I guess. A Single Shot is only just now coming overseas, courtesy the estimable folks in charge of Mulholland Books, and I'm quite excited to read it. The quotes on the back cover of the review copy I have reference Deliverance, of all things, and if there's anything at all to the comparison... why, I think I could come to like this book a lot.

It's been a while since I put myself through anything half so nerve-wracking as that. Too long, even!

Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

Vital Statistics

Published in the UK

on 20/09/11

by Atlantic Books

Review Priority

3 (We'll See)

The Blurb: Across the globe, millions of computer screens flicker with the artfully coded world of T'Rain - an addictive internet role-playing game of fantasy and adventure. But backstreet hackers in China have just unleashed a contagious virus called Reamde, and as it rampages through the gaming world spreading from player to player - holding hard drives hostage in the process - the computer of one powerful and dangerous man is infected, causing the carefully mediated violence of the on-line world to spill over into reality.

A fast-talking, internet-addicted mafia accountant is brutally silenced by his Russian employers, and Zula - a talented young T'Rain computer programmer - is abducted and bundled on to a private jet. As she is flown across the skies in the company of the terrified boyfriend she broke up with hours before, and a brilliant Hungarian hacker who may be her only hope, she finds herself sucked into a whirl of Chinese Secret Service agents and gun-toting American Survivalists; the Russian criminal underground and an al-Qaeda cell led by a charismatic Welshman; each a strand of a connected world that devastatingly converges in T'Rain.

An inimitable and compelling thriller that careers from British Columbia to South-West China via Russia and the fantasy world of T'Rain, Reamde is an irresistible epic from the unique imagination of one of today's most individual writers.

My Thoughts: What, only 1000 pages long? That's positively a short story by Neal Stephenson's standards!

That said... you know, I really do want to read this - this and another recent arrival nearing 1000 printed pages, which we'll talk about next week, all things being equal - but though the idea of such mammoth narratives always appeals to me in principle, in practice, alas, only very rarely do I have time on my hands to do such stories justice.

But maybe I'll make time for Reamde. Already I've heard some very promising things about it, and I suppose it's been a while since I binged on Anathem... who knows?

***

With which, we come to the conclusion of another chapter in the never-ending chronicle of books received by me. It's a good life, some weeks! :)

So what should I read first, folks? There's just so much to choose from, and sadly my decision-making capabilities usually pick moments like these to vanish with nary a trace...

Film Review | I Saw The Devil, dir. Jee-woon Kim

There's so much of everything these days: so many horror films, so many fantasy novels, so many first-person shooters... whatever your particular poison, there are in this day and age so very many candidates competing for your attention that you have to have some system to tell the wheat apart from the chaff.

Me? I tend to follow the talent. It's not enough that I Saw The Devil is a horror film from Korea, for instance. I've seen plenty of those, and more of them bad than good, in truth. But that it's the latest from Jee-woon Kim, the writer/director who brought us A Tale of Two Sisters and A Bittersweet Life? Well. That would have made it as good as a gimme... if I'd only known.

Somehow, however, I'd managed to completely blank on that really rather salient information, so it wasn't till the closing titles of I Saw The Devil rolled - fully two and a half hours after I'd selected a random movie from the international cinema shelf - that I realised what I'd been watching... and why I was so comprehensively blown away by it.

I Saw The Devil is without question the most effective horror film I've seen since The Human Centipede, and for all that film's faults, we can, I hope, agree that it had its merits, too: a truly ghastly premise, of course, but also a daring, unflinching vision, some unforgettable visual effects, and an atmosphere thick throughout with tension, terror, and pure, undiluted disgust. I Saw The Devil has all that and - brace yourselves, I'm going to say it - more.

From its first shot - the chronicle of a long drive along a desolate road blanketed in snow, from the POV of psycho-killer Kyung-chul, played to unnerving perfection by Min-sik Choi - through to its last, which I won't spoil, Jee-woon Kim's latest (perhaps even his greatest) is a beautiful, brutal thing; truly, madly, deeply masterful in its execution, and set apart from its radical conception on out. I Saw The Devil is in short a revenge thriller with a key differential, in that the avenger becomes as much a monster, in short order, as the monster he seeks vengeance from.

Our hero, such as he is: Jee-woon Kim's usual co-conspirator, the stalwart Byung-hun Lee as Kim Soo-hyeon, a married special forces fellow whose pregnant wife is slaughtered in I Saw The Devil's stark, not to mention shocking, cold open. Kim Soo-hyeon has little time for grief thereafter. He takes two weeks' worth of compassionate leave from the agency, and devotes every second of that time to the hunt for his wife's sadistic killer.

To my surprise, not even an hour into I Saw The Devil, Kim Soo-hyeon had both found and confronted the remorseless monster Kyung-chul... then, as if even murder were too good a fate for him, set him free, with - I shit you not - a wad of cash to pay his way. So begins a cruel and unusual (but justified insofar as any cold-blooded crime is) game of catch and release: Kim Soo-hyeon will track and trap Kyung-chul like the animal he is, until he judges this horrifying specimen of humanity has suffered as much or more than he imagines the love his life must have done.

I Saw The Devil is not a film for the faint-hearted, or anyone whose stomach churns at the thought of graphic depictions of all the evils men do: bloodshed, bullying, butchery; rape and molestation and murder. I Saw The Devil is not a film about any of these things, strictly speaking, but nor does it shy away from them, as so many movies do. Jee-woon Kim's camera rarely cuts away at the excruciating moment the horror tradition in cinema has led us to expect, if it does at all. Rather, it lingers... that we may see, and feel, the nerve-shredding extent of the awfulness unfolded in the name of vengeance, in Kim Soo-hyeon's case, or unfettered desire, per Kyung-chul's.

Both Byung-hun Lee and Min-sik Choi, as protagonist and antagonist, bring to their respective roles such complete commitment as to ably bear the terrible burden demanded of each; and each bears it in a manner steadfast to their character. Kyung-chul is manic, animated and utterly uninhibited. Kim Soo-hyeon, meanwhile, is stoic, spent but determined... an immovable force set against an unstoppable object. Which, one wonders, will give way first?

Beautifully shot, despite the horrors of what Jee-woon Kim is actually shooting, and so singularly faithful to its twisted vision as to leave the viewer reeling for most of its 150 minute run-time, I Saw The Devil is a rare steak of a film, comprehensively cooked, yes, but blue and oozing on the plate, sickeningly soft in the mouth, and metallic with the tang of still-warm blood as it coats your throat. It might very well make you sick. Equally, I Saw The Devil might be among the best meals you ever had.

The Scotsman Abroad | The Horrors of Horror

We had a good chat a couple of weeks ago, I think, about horror, and how horribly it tends to end. That was a discussion in large part brought to bear by Nathaniel Katz's review of The Ritual, and the Caitlin R. Kiernan I had been reading... but also a couple of movies I'd volunteered to watch for review on VideoVista, The Zone's sister site for cinema. A couple of horror movies, of course, that I'd heard great things about. 

Alas. These films were assuredly not great things, and in both cases that had a lot to do with the way they concluded... or didn't.

Why don't we start with the show-stopper? 

The Silent House is a Uruguayan found footage affair ostensibly shot in a single take, about a girl and her handyman father who go to clean up a cottage in the countryside only to find themselves terrorised by something that goes bump and stab in the night. It's actually good shit, for the most part. Sadly:

The Silent House would have been a manifestly more memorable piece in totality without its ill-conceived last act, wherein Hernandez takes it upon himself to explain what should by all rights be left inexplicable. In so doing, the ambitious director overreaches at the last (but not least) hurdle, systematically it seems subverting the power of all the alarming happenings he bade us witness only moments ago, because sadly, the muddled rationale Hernandez spells out - the big reveal before the final curtain comes clattering down, ten minutes too late - goes wholly against the internal logic so deliberately, delicately established before. We are left, then, with not the intricate puzzle we had presumed, to be turned over and over in our minds after the fact - perhaps unpicked in the fullness of time, or perhaps not - but only... a trick; a cheat; an unholy hoax. 

(read the full review here) 

That said, The Silent House seemed to me a masterpiece next to Julia's Eyes, the last film to bear super-producer Guillermo del Toro's name before Are You Afraid of the Dark? The problem with Julia's Eyes is as follows:

It is, at heart, a daft little horror film - proficiently executed on a technical level, from set dressing through effects by way of Fernando Velázquez's throwback Psycho score and Óscar Faura's exceptional cinematography, but narratively it is no more and no less than a nonsense - if not an utter nothing. Mistakenly, Morales approaches the film's story with such po-facedness as to render this ridiculous thing conspicuously ignorant of its own ridiculousness. He seems to think his themes far-reaching and his characters sincerely meaningful when they are in reality no more than cyphers, to a one; and how gripping his script?

I'll tell you: not... one... whit. Only in its moderately powerful middle third is Julia's Eyes even passing tense or atmospheric. In the erstwhile, it is limp, insubstantial, vastly overlong, and as obtuse as the revelation Morales attempts to pass off as a twist, come the dreadful dénouement, which only serves to underscore what an almighty waste of time Julia's Eyes is.

(read the full review here)

So we're right back where we started; surprise, surprise.

But stay tuned... all is not lost! Later this week I'll be reviewing the best horror film I've seen in some time, and certainly the most disturbing movie - genre or not - I've sat down with since The Human Centipede. So there's that.