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A review by millennial_dandy
The Presence by Yvonne MacManus
3.0
This was the first non-R.L.Stine pulp horror novel I'd picked up since reading 'The Ruins' over the summer, and it really was so much fun. When people talk about reading for fun, this is the kind of book I imagine. The ice cream of books, if you will.
Is the pacing the best? No. Do the characters act in a rational, realistic way? Not especially. Is it a banger of an original idea? No.
But this kind of book really scratches the itch I sometimes get for a 'desserty' read. You get the sugar rush of a fast-paced plot that may have tropes you've seen before but in some novel configuration that you don't have to think about too hard.
Now, I'm all in favor of and would even encourage readers to take the analysis of 'pulp fiction' just as seriously as literary fiction; nothing is void of meaning and messaging, after all. But sometimes you just want to turn your brain off, and I've found that 80s pulp horror really hits that mark for me.
You have your obligatory for the time 'Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars' commentary at points, and a witch possession story that utterly lacks any kind of internal examination.
If you look too hard, you realize the dissonance between the message that the witchhunts were bad because so many innocent people were murdered, and yet, in this timeline, witches are real and consorting with the devil, including the villain of this story who we are also supposed to sympathize with because she was an innocent victim... It gets a little murky.
Similarly, 'The Presence' has a weird relationship with religion. It establishes fairly early on that witches do in fact get their power from the Devil, but then veers off into how they're using psychic energy via the 'third eye' as studied by parapsychologists. There are also seances (that don't really go anywhere), discussions of 'poltergeists' as excess psychic energy. The science vs. religion aspects are a bit all over the place. And that makes the discussions of God a little awkward in-universe, because if we're meant to accept that the Devil is somehow behind all the goings-on (by harnessing psychic energy via the witch-ghost Abigail who channels it thorugh the girl, Emma???) then I would assume God also exists? And yet while all the characters accept the paranormal psychic-energy/Devil explanation, they ridicule the one character who is a born-again Christian fanatic?
It's...murky.
The way everyone behaves in this novel is a very amusing comedy of errors, especially given that like the protagonist, Carla, I've worked with children at a school. There's absolutely no way that a competent teacher or school would handle some of what happens the way they do in this book.
The art teacher flags a picture drawn by our villian-conduit, an eight year-old named Emma. The picture shows an image of someone being hanged in the background. Both he and Carla agree that this is odd and disturbing, but decide not to mention it to the girl's parents so as not to upset them (???). Then, the girl's step-mother straight up asks Carla if Emma is behaving strangely, or if she's noticed anything, and Carla, instead of mentioning this weird picture of the hanging or the general despondancy she'd noticed in Emma, just sort of shrugs it all off and tells the step-mother that everything's totally fine. And at no point, no matter what Emma does at school, does Carla think it's appropriate to tell the parents about it.
Carla gets her comeuppance for this gross negligance, though. Once Emma masters her 'third eye' she gives Carla constant headaches just because she was annoyed with her in one of the more 'yes, this definitely feels like an eight year-old' moments.
That all being said, I found the little idiosyncrasies of 'The Presence' to be more amusing than frustrating, the way a schlocky film can be entertaining. And the two 'on-screen' deaths that we get are delightfully gory and inventive (hey, this is a horror novel; we've got to talk about the gore!). Author Yvonne MacManus doens't shy away from killing kids either, so no one is safe. I also appreciated that for once the attractive, single female protagonist didn't get arbitrarily paired-off with whatever man happened to be closest by. She actually gets to finish out the story as single as she started and without even a single romantic subplot. I thought that was a nice break from tradition.
Is the pacing the best? No. Do the characters act in a rational, realistic way? Not especially. Is it a banger of an original idea? No.
But this kind of book really scratches the itch I sometimes get for a 'desserty' read. You get the sugar rush of a fast-paced plot that may have tropes you've seen before but in some novel configuration that you don't have to think about too hard.
Now, I'm all in favor of and would even encourage readers to take the analysis of 'pulp fiction' just as seriously as literary fiction; nothing is void of meaning and messaging, after all. But sometimes you just want to turn your brain off, and I've found that 80s pulp horror really hits that mark for me.
You have your obligatory for the time 'Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars' commentary at points, and a witch possession story that utterly lacks any kind of internal examination.
If you look too hard, you realize the dissonance between the message that the witchhunts were bad because so many innocent people were murdered, and yet, in this timeline, witches are real and consorting with the devil, including the villain of this story who we are also supposed to sympathize with because she was an innocent victim... It gets a little murky.
Similarly, 'The Presence' has a weird relationship with religion. It establishes fairly early on that witches do in fact get their power from the Devil, but then veers off into how they're using psychic energy via the 'third eye' as studied by parapsychologists. There are also seances (that don't really go anywhere), discussions of 'poltergeists' as excess psychic energy. The science vs. religion aspects are a bit all over the place. And that makes the discussions of God a little awkward in-universe, because if we're meant to accept that the Devil is somehow behind all the goings-on (by harnessing psychic energy via the witch-ghost Abigail who channels it thorugh the girl, Emma???) then I would assume God also exists? And yet while all the characters accept the paranormal psychic-energy/Devil explanation, they ridicule the one character who is a born-again Christian fanatic?
It's...murky.
The way everyone behaves in this novel is a very amusing comedy of errors, especially given that like the protagonist, Carla, I've worked with children at a school. There's absolutely no way that a competent teacher or school would handle some of what happens the way they do in this book.
The art teacher flags a picture drawn by our villian-conduit, an eight year-old named Emma. The picture shows an image of someone being hanged in the background. Both he and Carla agree that this is odd and disturbing, but decide not to mention it to the girl's parents so as not to upset them (???). Then, the girl's step-mother straight up asks Carla if Emma is behaving strangely, or if she's noticed anything, and Carla, instead of mentioning this weird picture of the hanging or the general despondancy she'd noticed in Emma, just sort of shrugs it all off and tells the step-mother that everything's totally fine. And at no point, no matter what Emma does at school, does Carla think it's appropriate to tell the parents about it.
Carla gets her comeuppance for this gross negligance, though. Once Emma masters her 'third eye' she gives Carla constant headaches just because she was annoyed with her in one of the more 'yes, this definitely feels like an eight year-old' moments.
That all being said, I found the little idiosyncrasies of 'The Presence' to be more amusing than frustrating, the way a schlocky film can be entertaining. And the two 'on-screen' deaths that we get are delightfully gory and inventive (hey, this is a horror novel; we've got to talk about the gore!). Author Yvonne MacManus doens't shy away from killing kids either, so no one is safe. I also appreciated that for once the attractive, single female protagonist didn't get arbitrarily paired-off with whatever man happened to be closest by. She actually gets to finish out the story as single as she started and without even a single romantic subplot. I thought that was a nice break from tradition.