Blair's Reviews > The Teardrop Method

One of the things I really love about reading is discovering a new(-to-me) author whose work makes me think: YES. This person writes exactly the way I like, and exactly the kind of fiction I crave, and I want to read everything of theirs I can get my hands on. That’s what happened with The Teardrop Method, a quietly haunting speculative novella, accompanied in this edition by an equally spellbinding short story.

In the title novella, Krisztina, a musician, hears the songs of people’s souls. She follows them around wintry Budapest, and in doing so realises someone – a man in a strange mask – is following her. This is a story that’s both disconcerting and beautiful, suffused with melancholy. It contains wonderful evocation of music: its sound and power. The atmosphere is perfect, the setting palpable, and there’s a terrifying/tragic villain, and even a story within a story. But, as Krisztina mourns her late partner and reconnects with her father, it also has that grounding in reality and human connection which I think is essential to good uncanny fiction.

In the linked story ‘Going Back to the World’, we’re with Susanna as she returns to the house she once shared with her ex, Dave, after his suicide. (Dave appears, sort of, in The Teardrop Method; he’s a music journalist who interviews both Krisztina and her father.) There’s arguably a stronger flavour of horror to this story – it’s certainly quite a bit creepier – but it retains the humanity of The Teardrop Method, as well as that sense of quietness that is, somehow, both unnerving and comforting.

This book positions Avery as an obvious heir to Joel Lane – at times I felt I was reading a Lane story. And to be clear, I don’t think Avery is copying Lane’s style at all, more that they both have the same – rare – ability to capture and pin down an ethereal, unsettling mood. I loved The Teardrop Method so much that I’m already prepared to proclaim Simon Avery as a new favourite.

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