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[Disclaimer: as with all the pieces in the Other Books series, this is just a tongue-welded-to-cheek speculation about what might happen in Green Fuse Burning, mostly as a way to promote horror/experimental work. I have not read the book. But I may read it later to see how wrong/prophetic I was]

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This one pulled me in the same way Reanimator did, with luminescent green on its cover.

Plant-related green.

Horror green.

And the promise of more green from the title.

Actually:

‘The first edition of Solaris was a green hardback. Many asylum patients had a copy by their beds. Green is the colour of hopelessness.’ – Dysnomia++ [2015]

But also the colour of ecstasy.

To me, at least.

Will Green Fuse Burning deal in this kind of duality?

Here’s the plot summary/synopsis [whichever one is correct]:

‘After the death of her estranged father, artist Rita struggles with grief and regret. There was so much she wanted to ask him—about his childhood, their family, and the Mi’kmaq language and culture from which Rita feels disconnected. But when Rita’s girlfriend Molly forges an artist’s residency application on her behalf, winning Rita a week to paint at an isolated cabin, Rita is both furious and intrigued. The residency is located where her father grew up.

On the first night at the cabin, Rita wakes to strange sounds. Was that a body being dragged through the woods? When she questions the locals about the cabin’s history, they are suspicious and unhelpful. Ignoring her unease, Rita gives in to dark visions that emanate from the forest’s lake and the surrounding swamp. She feels its pull, channelling that energy into art like she’s never painted before. But the uncanny visions become more insistent, more intrusive, and Rita discovers that in the swamp’s decay the end of one life is sometimes the beginning of another.’

As with a lot of these Other Book specs, I don’t know the author, have yet to read any of her other work, so a lot of the guesswork I come up with might be way off base.

But might be way on base too.

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