Book review: Comfort Me With Apples

This was a really strange book I read last night. It's very short, technically only a novella, so I finished it in about an hour. The description says "Comfort Me With Apples is the age old tale of the garden of Eden and the apples that have the knowledge of good and evil. It is the age old story of escaping from a life you were once content with when you realize why you shouldn't be content." 

Essentially, this book is a biblical allegory, and I knew that going in so the parallels were rather obvious while reading. In some Goodreads reviews, people said they didn't realize it was a biblical allegory until the end. Overall, I didn't like it that much, but I can sort of see what the author was going for. I wouldn't recommend this book unless it was specifically for a person I thought would be into weird biblical allegories with slight magical realism touches. 

It does not hit the spot of light surrealism the way I like. I would consider this book to be more like magical-realism-tinged medium to heavy surrealism, in some ways. Primarily the premise, which is only fully explained by the end of the book. At the beginning, before everything is made clear, it may feel more like light surrealism. Since I knew going in that it was some kind of biblical allegory, by the later portion of the book I could kind of predict/figure out what was going to happen. It overall felt a bit too predictable in an unsatisfying way, even regarding some other aspects in the beginning.     

At the beginning, I didn't particularly like this book. The writing style seemed too overwrought for my preferences. Towards the end, the writing style recedes somewhat and becomes a bit more normal as the plot picks up. But overall, I found this book rather meh and probably would have been more disappointed if it were longer and I'd spent more time on reading it. It gave me a similar feeling of "what the fuck did I just read" like J.G. Ballard's book "Crash," which was also bizarre but in a fairly different way. A review I saw somewhere said that it's slightly reminiscent of the short story The Yellow Wallpaper. 

I think I could have theoretically liked this book more if it had taken a more typical track/premise and were written more like a standard thriller/mystery, instead of a biblical allegory with magical realism. Or if it had been more of a sci-fi surrealism story. I am really not into fantasy or magical realism, which is adjacent, like fantasy-lite. 

In terms of surrealism, there are different flavors or subtypes. I particularly like light surrealism (could also be called subtle surrealism?) but medium to heavy surrealism can be interesting too. Aside from degrees of surrealism, the particular flavor or style has an impact too. A Clockwork Orange, for example, is more like dystopian-flavored heavy surrealism. There's technofuturist-surrealism (such as cyberpunk themes) which can also include dystopian surrealism. There are other varieties that aren't quite as easily described.