The Hair Wreath and Other Stories [Paperback]

I got an eGalley of thsi book through Netgalley(dot)com. It was a great read. The stories are full of beautiful descriptions and haunting events.

This is a collection of short stories. They range from rather incomplete very short glimpses into people's lives to nearly novella length complete stories. The best way to describe the collection is beautiful and haunting. Most of the stories feature either ghosts, or magical realism of some sort. Some of the stories don't necessarily involve magic but are just creepy or ironic.

I really enjoyed "Twenty-First-Century Design" a multiple chapter short story that tells about a haunted house that is taking over the father of the family. I also enjoyed "Salvage" which was a mysterious story about a young couple who finds pristine objects on their way to a picnic.

Some of the others of the stories end right in the middle. For example "Meadowdene Estates" is a creepy story about a suburban development, but it ends right as the main character is walking up some stair towards a noise. There were multiple stories that just ended and left me wondering. While this is not all bad, there were a couple that bothered me and made me want a bit more resolution.

Villegas's writing is absolutely stunning. She does an excellent job in describing surroundings, really making it easy for the reader to picture, taste, and smell the scenes in the stories. She also does an fantastic job with her characters, you feel like you know them and are drawn to them.

All of the stories are creepy. They span the whole breadth of creepiness. Some are serial killer creepy, some are psychotic creepy, some are ghost creepy, and some are just tinged with a little magical realism or irony. That being said there are some stories that don't contain anything supernatural but just give the reader a glimpse into a strange part of someone's life.

Overall I enjoyed this collection of stories. Villegas's writing is beautiful and haunting; she creates cityscapes that really come alive for the reader and fills her scenes with characters that are easy to engage with. The majority of the stories involve ghosts or other creepiness. Many of the urban scenes don't have anything bluntly supernatural but are filled with irony and a magical realism that depicts something supernatural just below the surface. If you are a fan of horror based urban fantasy, horror in general, or just love reading beautiful hauntingly creepy stories give this book a try.

It was the book's cover and elegant presentation (so many other books today insist on cramming as many words as possible into small paperbacks, making them almost unreadable no matter how good the prose is) which compelled me to buy it. The text is easy on the eyes and doesn't feel heavy; this is due to both, the author's economical writing style, and the clean, pristine font the publishers used to print her words. I had never heard of Halli Villegas before I read this collection, but I liked what I read. Most of the stories are short enough to read between school or work breaks, and the ones that aren't never drag on for a second.

That being said, the collection isn't without its flaws, though none of them dampened my overall enjoyment of it. Villegas's prose, I feel, is absolutely impeccable and almost poetic without being too wordy. Every story, even the ones I did not particularly like, content-wise, were a joy to read; not once did my eyes get tired and not once did the stories bore me.

Some of the stories in the collection, however, do tend to cross the line between what is "traditional" and what is "cliché" in the Horror genre. The opening piece, for example (the title piece, no less), is entirely predictable from its beginning to its end. It sets a properly somber mood throughout, yes, but the seen-it-a-thousand-times-before storyline prevents it from being great. Another story, "The Beautiful Boy," also falls into cliché territory, though this one is much more effective in its execution, and probably one of the most memorable stories of the bunch.

Other stories, such as "D in Underworld" and "Rites," tend to lean more towards character-based, literary fiction rather than Horror-based genre fiction (and I have every right to complain! The book was sold in Border's Horror section). D in Underworld is properly unsettling, but utterly unfulfilling by its conclusion. A few other stories in the collection suffer from this.

Villegas also seems to have a tendency to portray immigrants and minorities in a rather unflattering light; sometimes this happens in an apparent attempt to make a character either unlikeable or somewhat bitter, but the same angle strangely repeats itself several times throughout the collection. I suppose this only makes the stories more realistic; sometimes, it even works to great effect, as is the case with "The Other Side," a good story somewhat handicapped by a predictable twist.

Some of my favorite stories in the collection include: "Salvage (gave me shivers; more than I can say for most mainstream Horror fiction)," "The Family (it falls more into the Literary side of the collection, but I still enjoyed it immensely)," and "While He Sleeps (a ghost story from the ghost's point of view)," among others.

The book includes nineteen stories. Some of them feel like filler, some of them feel utterly trivial, and some of them are absolutely fantastic. But not one of them is hard to get through. Halli Villegas seems to have mastered a writing style so utterly unpretentious, so beautiful and so...sparse...that she makes every single story in the collection worth reading at least once, if not many times; so, I give credit where credit is due.

I recommend The Hair Wreath and Other Stories for fans of subtlety and restraint in their Horror; although, I should mention, from a devoted Clive Barker fan, this collection was a pleasure to read; so don't discredit it even if you like your Horror graphic! Give it a chance; it might surprise you.

I'll come clean. Halli Villegas is a friend of mine.

And so, I read her book with trepidation. What would I say if I didn't like it?

I needn't have worried.

This is a great collection of ghost stories. That said, if you are looking for hooks on car doors, or a severed head in the bread box, this is not the book for you.

The Hair Wreath rides the fine line between sensuality and horror. The horror is subtle and involves all 6 of your senses as you read it. The stories are immersive; you will feel like you are there.

The last story is set on a deserted spaceship -- do NOT read this at night, alone, in the dark. AND in case you don't like science fiction, this story is NOT science fiction. It is a ghost story set in the most isolated place imaginable.

While this is a beautiful physical book, I read it on the Kindle. Either way, it's a great read!