Customer Reviews

A Spider On My Tongue

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Novels by T. M. Wright are always a pleasure to read. He has a unique way of lulling the reader slowly into his grasp and then traps you in his madness where there's no turning back. This latest book is a bit more abstract than some of his other novels, but it remains fascinating nonetheless. No one I've ever read could blur the line between life and death so effectively.

I'm not sure how this ties into his earlier work, "A Manhattan Ghost Story", which is quoted many times throughout this book, but I felt as if I should have read that book first in order to absorb everything that Wright was trying to say. I do own a copy of "A Manhattan Ghost Story", but haven't had a chance to read it yet - I read dozens of horror authors and with all the new titles coming out, it's hard enough to keep up with them much less go back to read their old work - but I will some day.

T. M. Wright always challenges the reader in ways most authors today forget to do. I always finish his books with a dreamy, head-spinning, reflective feeling that I've grown somehow as a person from his words and messages. As if I've been included in some cosmic secret that only a select few are privileged to discover. Along with Gary A. Braunbeck and Tom Piccirilli, T. M. Wright is among the very best of the sophisticated horror authors writing today.

I cannot review this book. I just don't know what to say. Imagine this, just imagine, that someone is talking to you, as intimately as imaginable. In a quiet voice, just to you, and telling you things which simply cannot be. Telling you things, in such honesty and candor that you want to look away. You believe him, or you want to believe him because he is so very candid, but these are things that are beyond you.Abner Cray talks to ghosts. All the time. And he, himself, doesn't know if he is alive or dead.
This is A Spider on My Tongue. I can't write this review . Because this is a book unlike any other. You don't read it, you hear it. It is absolutely there with you, speaking in that low voice in your ear. It is Abner Cray telling you what he has experienced, and how he's experienced it, and you believe it. Absolutely.
Maybe later I will be able to write a good review. To be objective and intelligent about it. At this point, I can't. Spider on My Tongue is an obsessive indulgence. Sometimes I don't even know what I'm reading. TM Wright has this amazing ability to turn the simplest things into enigmas. All I can say is that I love reading this, it is utterly engrossing and interesting and beautifully written.
This is not a good review, and I apologise for that, but this book is outside the normal frame of things. I am continually gob-smacked at Wright's writing. He is, without question, one of the best writers in the English language extant. And yet, what is he writing? Closest I can come is the works of David Lindsay. The words are simple enough, but the meaning is far deeper and more complex.
Maybe later I will be able to do a better review. For now, this is what I have.