夏と花火と私の死体

Children can be really creepy sometimes!

This book includes 2 stories.

The titular story involves a dead body and those who want to hide it. Their attempts go on and on until it kills the suspense. But this also added a touch of humor and absurdity. Not sure if it was intentional or not, I liked it anyway.

What I liked the best though is how the setting is full of atmosphere. the story takes place in rural Japan and the author depicts the spirit and culture pretty well.

The other story is a lot shorter. Not a complex plot here, the horror mainly comes from a single twist. However I found it actually shocking and effective thanks to the short length of the story.

Difficulty: There are a lot of descriptions. If you are at a higher intermediate or advanced level you might find the book too slow and tiresome, but if you are an intermediate learner it's a good opportunity to practice lot's of different words.

There are two stories in this book, both dark (but not too much), but otherwise very different in style.

The titular story is written in very plain, unadorned language, and the descriptions are so matter-of-fact that they feel naïve, simplistic. I initially thought it was because the author was very young when he wrote it and hadn't found his style yet, but the second story, much more elegant in its narration, put the lie to this assumption. I'm now sure this was a deliberate choice to fit the voice of the narrator, a young (and dead, you might have guessed from the title) child. While we're dealing with the death of child, the story never gets sad or sentimental, but it does get darkly hilarious. I wasn't sure if any of that was intentional, but the ending was certainly rewarding, and showed that the author definitely had a plan with all the seemingly random details he casually put in place.

The second story felt better composed, more elegantly written, but also more conventional in its horror setting. This one was creepy rather than funny, and its ending was also nicely dark and surprising.

The book is an easy and quick read, and especially the first story is extremely simply written. There's no gore or actual horror, but there is definitely darkness and a (lightly) creepy atmosphere. A very pleasant read overall, after some initial misgivings on the first story's writing style.