Tiger folklore in Lackawanna county, Pennsylvania, childhood hand games, and a Bloody Summer where a bunch of locals are killed by tigers, who have mysteriously disappeared along with the town's children. I enjoyed the academic research narrative feel of the beginning. And I wanted the story to be longer, more fleshed out. Very, very good.

“For what is a child but a caged tiger, something that should have never been trapped in the first place?”HOLY SHIT

4.5/5'Bloody Summer' by Carmen Maria Machado is an engaging short story told through the form of a research paper. The author of the piece has studied hand games that are played by children in a town in Virginia. These hand games are all related to tigers and the town was the site of a tragic event related to tigers that left many of the inhabitants dead and all of the town's children missing. I loved how Machado uses the research paper to delve into the folklore of the town, particularly the ha...

Excellent short story! Machado takes this wild animal prompt and puts a paranormal horror spin on in. Bloody Summer is purportedly an academic research project into a town where a tiger massacre occurred years earlier and extant songs and hand games related to the incident exist among the children of the town. I might have liked this to be a little bit longer, but it was still great and I love Machado's writing. Content warning for non-explicit references to child sex abuse.

This one was creepy and good. I'm holding back from giving it a full five stars because, like many in this collection, I'm not exactly sure what just happened here. But Machado, unlike Vandermeer, clearly knows the answer, and provided enough pieces so that you can be sure you're making an educated guess. And the rest of the story was strong enough that any confusion didn't end up mattering very much.This one is actually written in the form of an ethnography by a researcher who is never named, w...

Trespass ("Take a walk on the wild side") is Amazon's new themed short story collection by popular authors. They're free to borrow for prime members, and the ebooks come with audio. I think these Amazon collections are meant to give you a taste of an author's style so that you'll find ones you vibe with and check out more of their work. I love that idea. It's why I was so excited about their sci-fi collection, Forward ("Tomorrow is sooner than you think"), even though I only ended up reading two...

The format was not the jam.

I waited until I finished the series to write my review. These were all short stories that focused on man versus nature scenarios. All with their own twists. I had read books by three of the six authors previous, and will be looking into a fourth. Earned the value of the monthly fee for my KU this time.

Short and perfectI loved this short story. I could also easily gobble up a whole novel of this. Definitely can't wait to read more of Machado's work. Her writing is stellar.

Horror Research PaperReview of the Amazon Original Kindle eBook released simultaneously with the Audible Original audiobook (February 24 2022).Machado's Bloody Summer is more of a supernatural horror than the 'terror of nature' stories which are the overall theme of the Trespass collection. In a future year of 2064, the researcher is examining the tragic events of July 13, 1999 in the town of Never-Again, Pennsylvania. The adults of the town had been massacred by what was thought to be escaped t...

CW: rape/sexual assault, child abuse, suicide. all referenced/alluded to, but nothing explicitly/graphically/fully on page. violence, bloodthis was outstanding. I'm amazed something so short could have such a heart punch. I love the writing style, the story laid out like a nonfictional one. like a paper, an interview. it's all so so good.

Carmen Maria Machado, like Shirley Jackson before her, writes a tale in which the reader thinks the story is heading one way, when, all of a sudden, one word, or in this case, one year, tips the reader that this story is heading in a completely different direction. Once the reader realizes the tale is fiction, it’s eye-opening in the best possible way. Carmen Maria Machado’s twisty horror tale traces the appearance of the wild tigers roaming in a small town in Pennsylvania, from the lines of han...

reads like a nonfiction but quickly morphs into something else. i honestly just love carmen’s works, such an ingenious writer.

Ah yes. This is some good stuff.The author definitely has a unique style that works well with non-fiction elements. I liked this even better than "In the dream House" because I think this kind of writing works better in shorter format. The other book felt "too much" altogether .. this one just hits it right.

The story of tiger attacks in a small town through folklore.

The style of approach (researching hand-games, which leads to focusing on a specific town and its troubling past) was a really engaging read, footnotes and all. Speaking as the researcher, the author took the time to discuss different elements of something I vaguely remember doing as a kid in school. Do kids still play these games in the era of Instagram and always-available screens with streaming content?(A word about the footnote: If you tap the footnote a second time after being taken to them...

“Bloody Summer” is part of the Trespass collection of short stories from Amazon Original Stories: “a collection of wild stories about animal instincts, human folly, and survival.” The entire collection is free to read as part of Amazon’s Prime Reading and have companion audio recordings. Tiger, tiger, burningbright,In the forests of the night. In bestselling author Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “Bloody Summer,” a researcher arrives in the well-studied town of Never-Again, Pennsylvania to

A researcher investigates the history of tiger sightings and attacks in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania. It concentrates on the tragic events of July 13,1999 when escaped tigers from a wildlife attraction mauled several people in the town of Never-Again, but tries to show how oral traditions intimate a much longer connection to the deadly striped predator. I thought this was supposed be a series on nature, so was slightly confused by the 2060s setting and supernatural components. Honestly, I lik...

The final story in Trespass, Bloody Summer reads like a nonfiction piece, like an academic’s scholarly publication. The narrator first describes the history of the town of Never-Again, suggesting how tigers could have ended up in Pennsylvania. Then we learn about a horrific and perplexing event one summer in the early 1990s, one that led to many deaths and disappearances. From there we learn about the tiger-related hand-games kids of the area played – which is a tad spooky. Finally, an interview...

I read all of the shorts included in the Trespass Collection. "The Tiger Came to the Mountains" was an excellent short story, with twins hiding in a cave waiting for the “all clear” to go home. "Wildlife" is about three odd ducks that live in a neighborhood - there are more neighbors, but we only meet the three. The odd ducks truly held my interest, but I definitely don't know what happened... How did I miss the chapter numbers were counting down until I was close to finished with the book? "The...