Customer Reviews:
 Good Short Stories, Bad Novella October 2, 2008
Chinatown Blue (S-O-T, UK)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The collection of supernatural tales that opens ths book are some of the best I've read, and I have read an unfeasibly large number of such stories. Atmospheric, creepy, downright chilling. But the novella which gives it its title is quite simply unreadable. If ruthlessly edited, it might have made a passable short story itself, but the melodramatic gothic tale goes on and on and on, padded out by relentless swathes of descriptive prose, philosophical treatises on life, love, romance, and a million other concepts, and bosom-heaving twaddle. Some intriguing characterisation is wasted, lost in a self-indulgent flood of verbiage. Buy it for the short stories, they are worth the money, but if you take my advice you won't even attempt the Witch.
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