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millennial_dandy's reviews
342 reviews
Astral Season, Beastly Season by Tahi Saihate
4.0
„He was a good guy. Apart from being a murderer.“
This little novel packs a poinant punch.
The premise of two high school boys trying to convince the police that a murder committed by their favorite pop star was committed by them to get her out of jail seems like the set-up for a fairly action-packed read, but 'Astral Season, Beastly Season' is actually much more introspective than plot-driven. There are some peaks and valleys in the action, but for the most part Tahi Saihate lets the inner worlds of our two protagonists take center stage.
Early on in the novel we're introduced to the idea that at seventeen, a person either becomes a star or a beast (hence, the title). Anyone who has ever been a teenager or who has worked with teenagers can attest that this is, pretty much categorically, true.
You see, that's really the story Saihate is trying to tell: given the wild premise, who do each of the players want to be?
The novel is broken into two parts, one following Yamashiro who teams up with his classmate to try and get their favorite pop idol off, and the second, taking place two years later, following a classmate of theirs, Watase.
The first half was definitely a ride, and I did enjoy it, but I liked the second half better. Watase's position of being the classmate of a convicted serial killer and trying to reconcile that with the boy she knew was just incredibly compelling. Especially after she meets up with another former classmate, who had been the killer's best friend prior to the murders. His adamance that "He was a good guy. Apart from being a murderer,“ was fascinating to unpack, especially as we see Watase get tugged in that and the opposing direction after the two of them meet up with one of the victems' brother at a shrine.
In the Goodreads summary, it's written that this is a 'meditation on belonging' and 'teenage lonliness' and it is certainly those things too, but I also think this was a meditation on what in German is called 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung,' or, 'the attempt to analyze, digest and learn to live with the past.' In Germany, this is most often employed in the context of the aftermath of the Holocaust, but given that it is largely about how this process works within the self as well as socially, I think it applies in this case too.
Neither Watase nor her former classmate had any direct involvement in or connection to (that they know of) the events of the first story other than having known the murderer and a few of his victims, yet they both have very strong emotional reactions to what happened. Or at least, their memories of what they know to have happened. Not to the victims, but to their understanding of who their classmate was.
Neither of them can grasp that someone they knew could commit such violent crimes, and they don't understand what could have led him to it. Watase is repulsed by the fact that her classmate chooses to hold onto the positive image of the murderer he had from when they were friends, yet she also feels a sense of cognative dissonance as she tries to decide where she fits into the story. Her best friend (but was she really her best friend?) was murdered, so surely that means she has the right to emotional baggage, doesn't she?
And they both wonder: 'why not me? Was I spared? If I wasn't even a consideration, does that count as being spared?'
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Saihate had a background in poetry, because a poet's sensibilities drench the text, though it is decidedly prose. I didn't care for her quotation mark (or lack thereof) choices, but over time I did get used to the style.
This novel is an excellent, unflinching, psychological portrait of two teenagers caught in the throes of self-consciousness, confusion, emotional volitility, and obsession.
This little novel packs a poinant punch.
The premise of two high school boys trying to convince the police that a murder committed by their favorite pop star was committed by them to get her out of jail seems like the set-up for a fairly action-packed read, but 'Astral Season, Beastly Season' is actually much more introspective than plot-driven. There are some peaks and valleys in the action, but for the most part Tahi Saihate lets the inner worlds of our two protagonists take center stage.
Early on in the novel we're introduced to the idea that at seventeen, a person either becomes a star or a beast (hence, the title). Anyone who has ever been a teenager or who has worked with teenagers can attest that this is, pretty much categorically, true.
You see, that's really the story Saihate is trying to tell: given the wild premise, who do each of the players want to be?
The novel is broken into two parts, one following Yamashiro who teams up with his classmate to try and get their favorite pop idol off, and the second, taking place two years later, following a classmate of theirs, Watase.
The first half was definitely a ride, and I did enjoy it, but I liked the second half better. Watase's position of being the classmate of a convicted serial killer and trying to reconcile that with the boy she knew was just incredibly compelling. Especially after she meets up with another former classmate, who had been the killer's best friend prior to the murders. His adamance that "He was a good guy. Apart from being a murderer,“ was fascinating to unpack, especially as we see Watase get tugged in that and the opposing direction after the two of them meet up with one of the victems' brother at a shrine.
In the Goodreads summary, it's written that this is a 'meditation on belonging' and 'teenage lonliness' and it is certainly those things too, but I also think this was a meditation on what in German is called 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung,' or, 'the attempt to analyze, digest and learn to live with the past.' In Germany, this is most often employed in the context of the aftermath of the Holocaust, but given that it is largely about how this process works within the self as well as socially, I think it applies in this case too.
Neither Watase nor her former classmate had any direct involvement in or connection to (that they know of) the events of the first story other than having known the murderer and a few of his victims, yet they both have very strong emotional reactions to what happened. Or at least, their memories of what they know to have happened. Not to the victims, but to their understanding of who their classmate was.
Neither of them can grasp that someone they knew could commit such violent crimes, and they don't understand what could have led him to it. Watase is repulsed by the fact that her classmate chooses to hold onto the positive image of the murderer he had from when they were friends, yet she also feels a sense of cognative dissonance as she tries to decide where she fits into the story. Her best friend (but was she really her best friend?) was murdered, so surely that means she has the right to emotional baggage, doesn't she?
And they both wonder: 'why not me? Was I spared? If I wasn't even a consideration, does that count as being spared?'
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Saihate had a background in poetry, because a poet's sensibilities drench the text, though it is decidedly prose. I didn't care for her quotation mark (or lack thereof) choices, but over time I did get used to the style.
This novel is an excellent, unflinching, psychological portrait of two teenagers caught in the throes of self-consciousness, confusion, emotional volitility, and obsession.
The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
4.0
"I have memories of memories" -- Lady Daphne Valance
This is my second Hollinghurst, and I am pleased to say my hope after reading 'The Swimming-Pool Library' that he would mature as a writer as he went along came true! 'The Stranger's Child' plays perfectly into the strengths of that first novel, namely Hollinghurst's technical writing skills and determination to be a queer historian.
The 'Stranger's Child' itself feels like a combination of E.M. Forster's 'Maurice' and Paul La Farge's 'The Night Ocean' (which would come out six years later). We get the queerness and the cottage-core aesthetic from Forster, and the investigation into the mythologizing of a historic figure from La Farge.
A big brick of a book at five and a half hundred pages, 'The Stranger's Child', in a phrase, is an exploration of the evolution of queer visibility and acceptance in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and how it correlated with the decay of the rigid class structure of Edwardian England. But it's equally a discussion of how myth very easily overshadows fact, sometimes because it has to, and sometimes because it's more convenient.
At the center of the plot lies the question: 'just who was Cecil Valance?' He's a World War One era poet, sort of. His most famous poem, 'Two Acres' is described in the text as mediocre, yet after being quoted by the prime minister, both poem and poet (by then killed in action in the war) become emblematic of England's 'Lost Generation' and the way of life that was lost with them. The poem didn't have to be good; it just had to capture something of the zeitgeist -- the kind of poem made for school kids to memorize; a digestible, subliminal bit of patriotism.
The poet behind a work that would become so ubiquitous and so closely tied to English identity has to adhere to a certain purity of character in the public consciousness, and so upon his tragic death, his immediate family and friends close ranks to ensure that anything untoward about his life remains hidden from the public.
Just what those untoward things might have been becomes the (sort of) mystery at the heart of the plot after a time jump from the late 1920s to the 1960s. Works on the figures and stories of 'The Great War' era are in vogue, and two young men find themselves drawn to the enigmatic, romantic figure of Cecil Valance. They each come to be entangled (to greater and lesser degree) with the poet's remaining family, principally his younger sister, Daphne--now an old woman, and his niece (or is she?), Corinna.
The family, which at the beginning of the novel in 1913, is at its peak in terms of wealth and status, is now in decline, no longer glamorous aristocrats, but middle class with a pedigree. In the end, they end up a punchline: destitute hoarders and drunks who absurdly still hold the titles of 'Lord' and 'Lady'.
While the aristocrats fall into decay in the shadows of their decaying villas and manor houses, the queers step tentatively out into the sunshine.
It's 1967, and England is on the verge of passing the 'Sexual Offences Act' which would decriminalize sex between men, and allow our protagonists of the chapter, Paul and Peter, to pursue, if not a full blown 'out' relationship, certainly at least one that wouldn't land them in prison and could even be allowed to develop within a community, albeit one that was still on the fringes of society. It's also the first time gay folks have the opportunity to look backwards and dare to try to find themselves in history.
But despite the changing times, Cecil Valance's family isn't willing to allow him to be put under that inquisitive microscope, dancing around not only questions of his relationships with men, but avoiding saying anything at all that would tarnish the image of Cecil as the golden boy of his generation, and their own reputations by extension (though by this point, all of these people have an overinflated sense of their import in the public consciousness).
Because we get to meet Cecil at the opening of the novel, we readers know the answers to things the characters post-time jump can only speculate about, including who the famous poem 'Two Acres' was actually written for.
Hollinghurst has said in multiple interviews that a major preoccupation he has as a gay author is queer history and how that history has shaped queer identity over time-- those ripples visible even today. That was clear in 'The Swimming-Pool Library' and it's very clear here. Really, 'The Stranger's Child' feels like the book 'The Swimming-Pool Library' wanted to be. Or at least, what I wanted it to be, and I'm so glad he wrote it for that reason alone.
By showing us queer characters in three vastly different epochs (the 19-teens, the 60s/70s, and the mid-2000s), Hollinghurst leaves us feeling optimistic, and with the hope that future generations won't have to press 80 year old women for juicy tales of her ex-fiancé or poke around in condemned buildings looking for lost love letters to find scraps of themselves in history.
'The Stranger's Child' was published in 2011, and that optimism of the 2010s about the future of the LGBT+ community feels rather naive now in light of the recent culture war determined to play tug of war with queer rights. After over a century of feeling our rights and visibility expanding, it's scary and sad to imagine going back to Cecil Valance's world, one that hurt, if not his life, the lives and happiness of those caught in the fallout of having loved him.
No one in this novel is without reproach, and it's hard to say whether any of the characters are altogether good people with purely good intentions. Even the would-be Cecil Valance biographer, whose initial wish is to know if the poet he admires was like him, becomes so convinced of the importance of his mission, and so caught up in the mystery that he stops caring about the real people in front of him. It raises questions about the ethics of biography, about the veracity
and trustworthiness of memory, about the ability to find concrete answers, and even the degree to which it matters.
Indeed, Hollinghurst says of this aspect of the novel: "my subject was more to do with, not remembering, but forgetting, and the way so much about the past, about our own lives, is sort of irrevocably lost to us."
Who was Cecil Valance?
He was the person each era needed him to be.
I really, really enjoyed my time with this novel. Yes, it was overwritten, and I also wish it had been structured differently, rearranged so that we meet Cecil at the end in a sort of post-script so that the 'mystery' was actually a mystery, and I might have cut most if not all of the episodes in 1926 and 1967; the intrigue they spawned felt more like the tendrils of television series subplots than something this novel needed to keep itself streamlined. But it's an engaging, sprawling, beautifully rendered novel, and you can feel Hollinghurst's love for the characters and the world he created for them oozing out of it (hence, the overwriting I daresay).
I was on the fence after 'The Swimming-Pool Library', but post-'The Stranger's Child' I would definitely count myself a Hollinghurst fan, and I fully intend to check out his latest novel, 'The Sparsholt Affair' when I'm ready for another tome that could double as a doorstop.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As a bit of a postscript, in an interview for Radio National, Hollinghurst reveals that two of his big inspirations for the novel were the life and legacy of real life WWI poet Robert Brooke, many elements of which Hollinghurst says he "rather shamelessly lifted," and Michael Holroyd's biography of the writer Lytton Strachy, originally published in 1967. Just thought I'd mention for anyone else inspired to go down a little rabbit hole after they finish the novel.
This is my second Hollinghurst, and I am pleased to say my hope after reading 'The Swimming-Pool Library' that he would mature as a writer as he went along came true! 'The Stranger's Child' plays perfectly into the strengths of that first novel, namely Hollinghurst's technical writing skills and determination to be a queer historian.
The 'Stranger's Child' itself feels like a combination of E.M. Forster's 'Maurice' and Paul La Farge's 'The Night Ocean' (which would come out six years later). We get the queerness and the cottage-core aesthetic from Forster, and the investigation into the mythologizing of a historic figure from La Farge.
A big brick of a book at five and a half hundred pages, 'The Stranger's Child', in a phrase, is an exploration of the evolution of queer visibility and acceptance in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and how it correlated with the decay of the rigid class structure of Edwardian England. But it's equally a discussion of how myth very easily overshadows fact, sometimes because it has to, and sometimes because it's more convenient.
At the center of the plot lies the question: 'just who was Cecil Valance?' He's a World War One era poet, sort of. His most famous poem, 'Two Acres' is described in the text as mediocre, yet after being quoted by the prime minister, both poem and poet (by then killed in action in the war) become emblematic of England's 'Lost Generation' and the way of life that was lost with them. The poem didn't have to be good; it just had to capture something of the zeitgeist -- the kind of poem made for school kids to memorize; a digestible, subliminal bit of patriotism.
The poet behind a work that would become so ubiquitous and so closely tied to English identity has to adhere to a certain purity of character in the public consciousness, and so upon his tragic death, his immediate family and friends close ranks to ensure that anything untoward about his life remains hidden from the public.
Just what those untoward things might have been becomes the (sort of) mystery at the heart of the plot after a time jump from the late 1920s to the 1960s. Works on the figures and stories of 'The Great War' era are in vogue, and two young men find themselves drawn to the enigmatic, romantic figure of Cecil Valance. They each come to be entangled (to greater and lesser degree) with the poet's remaining family, principally his younger sister, Daphne--now an old woman, and his niece (or is she?), Corinna.
The family, which at the beginning of the novel in 1913, is at its peak in terms of wealth and status, is now in decline, no longer glamorous aristocrats, but middle class with a pedigree. In the end, they end up a punchline: destitute hoarders and drunks who absurdly still hold the titles of 'Lord' and 'Lady'.
While the aristocrats fall into decay in the shadows of their decaying villas and manor houses, the queers step tentatively out into the sunshine.
It's 1967, and England is on the verge of passing the 'Sexual Offences Act' which would decriminalize sex between men, and allow our protagonists of the chapter, Paul and Peter, to pursue, if not a full blown 'out' relationship, certainly at least one that wouldn't land them in prison and could even be allowed to develop within a community, albeit one that was still on the fringes of society. It's also the first time gay folks have the opportunity to look backwards and dare to try to find themselves in history.
But despite the changing times, Cecil Valance's family isn't willing to allow him to be put under that inquisitive microscope, dancing around not only questions of his relationships with men, but avoiding saying anything at all that would tarnish the image of Cecil as the golden boy of his generation, and their own reputations by extension (though by this point, all of these people have an overinflated sense of their import in the public consciousness).
Because we get to meet Cecil at the opening of the novel, we readers know the answers to things the characters post-time jump can only speculate about, including who the famous poem 'Two Acres' was actually written for.
Hollinghurst has said in multiple interviews that a major preoccupation he has as a gay author is queer history and how that history has shaped queer identity over time-- those ripples visible even today. That was clear in 'The Swimming-Pool Library' and it's very clear here. Really, 'The Stranger's Child' feels like the book 'The Swimming-Pool Library' wanted to be. Or at least, what I wanted it to be, and I'm so glad he wrote it for that reason alone.
By showing us queer characters in three vastly different epochs (the 19-teens, the 60s/70s, and the mid-2000s), Hollinghurst leaves us feeling optimistic, and with the hope that future generations won't have to press 80 year old women for juicy tales of her ex-fiancé or poke around in condemned buildings looking for lost love letters to find scraps of themselves in history.
'The Stranger's Child' was published in 2011, and that optimism of the 2010s about the future of the LGBT+ community feels rather naive now in light of the recent culture war determined to play tug of war with queer rights. After over a century of feeling our rights and visibility expanding, it's scary and sad to imagine going back to Cecil Valance's world, one that hurt, if not his life, the lives and happiness of those caught in the fallout of having loved him.
No one in this novel is without reproach, and it's hard to say whether any of the characters are altogether good people with purely good intentions. Even the would-be Cecil Valance biographer, whose initial wish is to know if the poet he admires was like him, becomes so convinced of the importance of his mission, and so caught up in the mystery that he stops caring about the real people in front of him. It raises questions about the ethics of biography, about the veracity
and trustworthiness of memory, about the ability to find concrete answers, and even the degree to which it matters.
Indeed, Hollinghurst says of this aspect of the novel: "my subject was more to do with, not remembering, but forgetting, and the way so much about the past, about our own lives, is sort of irrevocably lost to us."
Who was Cecil Valance?
He was the person each era needed him to be.
I really, really enjoyed my time with this novel. Yes, it was overwritten, and I also wish it had been structured differently, rearranged so that we meet Cecil at the end in a sort of post-script so that the 'mystery' was actually a mystery, and I might have cut most if not all of the episodes in 1926 and 1967; the intrigue they spawned felt more like the tendrils of television series subplots than something this novel needed to keep itself streamlined. But it's an engaging, sprawling, beautifully rendered novel, and you can feel Hollinghurst's love for the characters and the world he created for them oozing out of it (hence, the overwriting I daresay).
I was on the fence after 'The Swimming-Pool Library', but post-'The Stranger's Child' I would definitely count myself a Hollinghurst fan, and I fully intend to check out his latest novel, 'The Sparsholt Affair' when I'm ready for another tome that could double as a doorstop.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As a bit of a postscript, in an interview for Radio National, Hollinghurst reveals that two of his big inspirations for the novel were the life and legacy of real life WWI poet Robert Brooke, many elements of which Hollinghurst says he "rather shamelessly lifted," and Michael Holroyd's biography of the writer Lytton Strachy, originally published in 1967. Just thought I'd mention for anyone else inspired to go down a little rabbit hole after they finish the novel.
Barcelona Plates by Alexei Sayle
4.0
3.5 rounded up to 4
"Barnaby's girlfriend thought the funniest thing in the world was people being killed while they were on holiday."
From this very first line, I was hooked by Alexei Sayle's offbeat sense of humor; a successful mix of the absurd and the macabre that he wielded to great effect when putting together this collection of snapshots of the underbelly of society.
We run the gamut in terms of protagonists: first person, third person, men, women, old, middle-aged, likeable, deplorable, pathetic, sympathetic, all riding life's roller coaster, but all malcontent in some way, all searching for something. Sometimes they find it, sometimes they don't, sometimes they get more than what they bargained for.
The back of the book promises 'a septuagenarian contract killer, a chronic hypochondriac, two zombie-creating comedians...' -- all we're missing is a partridge in a pear tree. But although these ideas sound cartoonish, Sayle manages to imbue (most of) them with pulsing humanity so that you really understand why and how these people come to be the way that they are.
Some of the stories are action-packed and punchy, but I liked the stories that lingered better, though they too came with some kind of bonkers twist.
In particular, I really enjoyed:
1. 'Back in Ten Minutes' in which a woman goes to retrieve her interview suit from a dry cleaner’s only to find the owner has closed the shop permanently overnight.'
2. 'You're Only Middle Aged Once', the story of a hypochondriac who makes it big as a columnist after crafting himself into a chronically ill man suffering from various maladies. The ending to this story was near perfect pitch.
3. 'Big-Headed Cartoon Animal' is the most surrealist of all the stories, and without giving away too much, I'll just say that it's about a couple who go to a Disney Park and one of them has a very strange experience involving a character actor of Goofy and one of the trash cans at the park.
4. 'Locked Out' lands at the other end of the spectrum and is more 'no plot, just vibes.' Very eery and cerebral, it's the story of a woman who has locked herself out of her house and has to wait for her husband to get home from work to get let in. The entire thing takes place in her car while she waits.
If you have a dark, absurdist sense of humor, there's definitely one or more stories in this collection for you, and you probably won't hate any of them, though you'll like some more than others.
The Times is quoted on the cover as calling it "arch, desiccated and menacing." I get what they were saying, but although there were moments where I could feel Sayle giving himself a little tap on the side of the nose, I wouldn't principally describe 'Barcelona Plates' that way. Dry in that British sort of way, yes, menacing, a bit, but I never felt like I was being preached at or talked down to, more so like Sayle and I were in on the joke together.
I had just two quibbles overall, and these speak to me specifically as a reader, so if they don't apply to you, pay them no mind.
Firstly, this is a very British collection written in a very British voice, meaning that Sayle is constantly name-dropping streets and boroughs with the casual assumption that the reader knows what he's talking about and has a map of London imprinted on the backs of their eyelids. I do not, and so I'd end of skimming entire paragraphs of him as he gave these incredibly specific, triangulated descriptions of where the story was located, or where a character was going or coming from.
Secondly, although the overall sense I get from the types of stories these are and the types of absurdism employed is that 'Barcelona Plates' is coming from a very left-wing place, there was one area where I could sense an unexamined bias of Sayle's peeking through. He has a consistent habit of using 'black' and 'brown' as shorthand descriptors for degeneracy, especially when setting a scene. For instance, and this was hardly the only time, but in one story a woman is attacked by three men who are given no other description than 'swarthy.' He also uses people of color as background figures to add what I can only describe as 'spice' or 'flavor' to a scene.
The same could be said, frankly, of how he employs 'fat' as shorthand to dehumanizing effect.
These habits felt very odd considering how purposefully he employed them at other times. He'll throw in lines or subplots about the intersections of race and class in some stories, but then do the thing I described in many of the others in ways that feel unconscious.
And it's not as though he's unaware of how bias shapes reality; the entire story 'The Minister For Death' is about how the seventy-two year old protagonist is able to be such a successful assassin because old people are ignored and therefore rendered invisible in a society that only values the personhood of the young.
It's strange.
I'm tempted to think these choices were meant to be reflections of the mindset of the characters he wrote, but if that's the case, he didn't add enough nuance or commentary or internal criticism to make sense of what the point was. Sure, lots of people have these racial and body-type biases and unconscious, baked-in sensibilities, but these were fictional characters, and by just presenting them that way uncritically would only serve to re-enforce those biases in readers who also think that way, not get them to look inward at why they themselves have these feelings about people of color or fat people.
I dunno, maybe I'm being nit-picky, but if you go out of your way to try to present a particular perspective, namely one spotlighting otherized or otherwise overlooked groups of people and on the other hand critique how absurdly out of touch the bourgeoisie is, it seems like a bizarre mis-step.
That being said, even though this pricked at me during and after my reading of 'Barcelona Plates', make no mistake: I really liked this collection overall, and the hits were huge hits.
"Barnaby's girlfriend thought the funniest thing in the world was people being killed while they were on holiday."
From this very first line, I was hooked by Alexei Sayle's offbeat sense of humor; a successful mix of the absurd and the macabre that he wielded to great effect when putting together this collection of snapshots of the underbelly of society.
We run the gamut in terms of protagonists: first person, third person, men, women, old, middle-aged, likeable, deplorable, pathetic, sympathetic, all riding life's roller coaster, but all malcontent in some way, all searching for something. Sometimes they find it, sometimes they don't, sometimes they get more than what they bargained for.
The back of the book promises 'a septuagenarian contract killer, a chronic hypochondriac, two zombie-creating comedians...' -- all we're missing is a partridge in a pear tree. But although these ideas sound cartoonish, Sayle manages to imbue (most of) them with pulsing humanity so that you really understand why and how these people come to be the way that they are.
Some of the stories are action-packed and punchy, but I liked the stories that lingered better, though they too came with some kind of bonkers twist.
In particular, I really enjoyed:
1. 'Back in Ten Minutes' in which a woman goes to retrieve her interview suit from a dry cleaner’s only to find the owner has closed the shop permanently overnight.'
2. 'You're Only Middle Aged Once', the story of a hypochondriac who makes it big as a columnist after crafting himself into a chronically ill man suffering from various maladies. The ending to this story was near perfect pitch.
3. 'Big-Headed Cartoon Animal' is the most surrealist of all the stories, and without giving away too much, I'll just say that it's about a couple who go to a Disney Park and one of them has a very strange experience involving a character actor of Goofy and one of the trash cans at the park.
4. 'Locked Out' lands at the other end of the spectrum and is more 'no plot, just vibes.' Very eery and cerebral, it's the story of a woman who has locked herself out of her house and has to wait for her husband to get home from work to get let in. The entire thing takes place in her car while she waits.
If you have a dark, absurdist sense of humor, there's definitely one or more stories in this collection for you, and you probably won't hate any of them, though you'll like some more than others.
The Times is quoted on the cover as calling it "arch, desiccated and menacing." I get what they were saying, but although there were moments where I could feel Sayle giving himself a little tap on the side of the nose, I wouldn't principally describe 'Barcelona Plates' that way. Dry in that British sort of way, yes, menacing, a bit, but I never felt like I was being preached at or talked down to, more so like Sayle and I were in on the joke together.
I had just two quibbles overall, and these speak to me specifically as a reader, so if they don't apply to you, pay them no mind.
Firstly, this is a very British collection written in a very British voice, meaning that Sayle is constantly name-dropping streets and boroughs with the casual assumption that the reader knows what he's talking about and has a map of London imprinted on the backs of their eyelids. I do not, and so I'd end of skimming entire paragraphs of him as he gave these incredibly specific, triangulated descriptions of where the story was located, or where a character was going or coming from.
Secondly, although the overall sense I get from the types of stories these are and the types of absurdism employed is that 'Barcelona Plates' is coming from a very left-wing place, there was one area where I could sense an unexamined bias of Sayle's peeking through. He has a consistent habit of using 'black' and 'brown' as shorthand descriptors for degeneracy, especially when setting a scene. For instance, and this was hardly the only time, but in one story a woman is attacked by three men who are given no other description than 'swarthy.' He also uses people of color as background figures to add what I can only describe as 'spice' or 'flavor' to a scene.
The same could be said, frankly, of how he employs 'fat' as shorthand to dehumanizing effect.
These habits felt very odd considering how purposefully he employed them at other times. He'll throw in lines or subplots about the intersections of race and class in some stories, but then do the thing I described in many of the others in ways that feel unconscious.
And it's not as though he's unaware of how bias shapes reality; the entire story 'The Minister For Death' is about how the seventy-two year old protagonist is able to be such a successful assassin because old people are ignored and therefore rendered invisible in a society that only values the personhood of the young.
It's strange.
I'm tempted to think these choices were meant to be reflections of the mindset of the characters he wrote, but if that's the case, he didn't add enough nuance or commentary or internal criticism to make sense of what the point was. Sure, lots of people have these racial and body-type biases and unconscious, baked-in sensibilities, but these were fictional characters, and by just presenting them that way uncritically would only serve to re-enforce those biases in readers who also think that way, not get them to look inward at why they themselves have these feelings about people of color or fat people.
I dunno, maybe I'm being nit-picky, but if you go out of your way to try to present a particular perspective, namely one spotlighting otherized or otherwise overlooked groups of people and on the other hand critique how absurdly out of touch the bourgeoisie is, it seems like a bizarre mis-step.
That being said, even though this pricked at me during and after my reading of 'Barcelona Plates', make no mistake: I really liked this collection overall, and the hits were huge hits.
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
5.0
"I looked upon the scene before me -- upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain-- upon the bleak walls--upon the vacant eye-like windows--upon a few rank sedges--and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium -- the bitter lapse into every-day life-- the hidious dropping off of the veil."
A perfect American Gothic horror story. No notes.
You could summarize 'The Fall of the House of Usher' in just the word 'dread' and it still wouldn't convey how uneasy Poe makes you feel reading this story. I've read it at least several times and even had it on a class reading list at Uni where we studied it closely. I know exactly what happens in the end, and yet still when I re-read it makes me feel anxious and somehow both claustrophic and agoraphobic at the same time, so, no comfort here.
Poe demonstrates in 'The Fall of the House of Usher' that he truly understood the genre he was writing within and what makes it so effective and a good horror story so enduring.
Sure, the 'twist' at the end is horrifying, but its the terror leading up to it that stays with me. It's the way he twists a Sir Lancelot story into something grotesque and creepy, it's the uncanniness of the setting, the characters shut up in a huge, decaying house.
Not a word wasted in this one, so stop wasting time reading what some stranger on the internet thinks and go read it!
A perfect American Gothic horror story. No notes.
You could summarize 'The Fall of the House of Usher' in just the word 'dread' and it still wouldn't convey how uneasy Poe makes you feel reading this story. I've read it at least several times and even had it on a class reading list at Uni where we studied it closely. I know exactly what happens in the end, and yet still when I re-read it makes me feel anxious and somehow both claustrophic and agoraphobic at the same time, so, no comfort here.
Poe demonstrates in 'The Fall of the House of Usher' that he truly understood the genre he was writing within and what makes it so effective and a good horror story so enduring.
Sure, the 'twist' at the end is horrifying, but its the terror leading up to it that stays with me. It's the way he twists a Sir Lancelot story into something grotesque and creepy, it's the uncanniness of the setting, the characters shut up in a huge, decaying house.
Not a word wasted in this one, so stop wasting time reading what some stranger on the internet thinks and go read it!
The Meaning Of Everything by Simon Winchester
5.0
"I am a nobody [...] Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether."
So spake Sir James Augustus Henry Murray, a key and, as it turns out, much beloved figure in the history of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and not, in fact, a nobody at all.
And yet, this quote illustrates, in a way, how I, and I reckon many others too, think of the people who write the dictionary (if we think of them at all). The dictionary is just a thing that exists, and surely has always existed. Like gravity.
Imagine my surprise that this isn't in fact the case. The dictionary had to be conceived of, then painstakingly put together, and all (gasp) without the internet!
So what did people do before you could google 'what is a balm-cricket?' or look it up in one of those books that didn't always exist purely to populate the bookcases in period films?
They wrote to Lord Tennyson to ask him, of course! Which Murray did: "I write [...] to Lord Tennyson to ask where he got the word balm-cricket and what he meant by it." (p.146)
'The Meaning of Everything' was probably the biggest surprise of the year for me, a 5-star read slipping in just under the wire for 2022.
At the time of its publication in 2003, the New York Times Book Review described it as 'supremely readable', going on to say: "The Meaning of Everything is teeming with knowledge and alive with insights. Winchester handles humor and awe with modesty and cunning."
Took the words right out of my mouth.
Author Simon Winchester's enthusiasm for the subject oozes out of every sentence, and by the time I finished it I was amazed that he'd managed to tell a complex story that spans near 100 years into 250 incredibly engaging and often hilarious bite-sized pages.
The first chapter alone is a delight, in which Winchester brings us through the history of the English language and the etymology of such words as 'sock' and 'they, them, and their'. It gives us a nice flavor of what all went on among the lexicographers as they tried to wrestle the English language into submission in Murray's scriptorium.
It's also here that he shows his hand and admits (as any decent linguist would) that English, like any language, being joyfully descriptive, has always been and always will be impossible to pin down by even the staunchest of prescriptivists:
And there's joy in that.
Much later, when he writes of J.R.R. Tolkien's work on the OED, Winchester reminds us that it's this wonderful fluidity that allows for such words as 'hobbit' to enter the dictionary and keep what Samuel Johnson described as a 'terrible undertow of words' flowing and the language alive and healthy.
But though these sections early on are fascinating in their own right, when we kick off the start of the project that would become the OED, Winchester shifts gears towards highlighting the exceptionally colorful and eccentric (mostly) men who undertook what would turn out to be a lifetime of trying to get a monster of a book into the hands and homes of English speakers worldwide.
But rest assured: there are still fun morsels of information on specific words scattered throughout (apparently 'walrus' was a toughie).
I'd highly, highly recommend this book to anyone with even the most fleeting curiosity about how a dictionary is birthed, and by whom this one was brought into the world, and certainly to anyone who, like me, considers themselves an amateur bibliophile.
I know I saw myself in our central hero, Murray:
"The fact that so many of the B words had been wholly unfamiliar [...] tempted some critics to say that Murray was so slow simply because he was searching out obscurities, and was moreover doing so deliberately, to annoy and obfuscate." (p.178)
What true lover of language wouldn't have done the same in his place?
And Murray is just one in the tapestry of characters. We also get to learn of "George Perkins Marsh [...] the man who introduced the camel to the Wild West (to the rather limited degree that it has been introduced)" (p.212), and of William Chester Minor who is credited as one of the 'most celebrated of the volunteers' who worked for 21 years documenting early uses of key words from his cell at a sanitarium. And many, many more.
'The Meaning of Everything' will make you want to become a lexicographer or one of the volunteer readers who submit quotations for use in future editions of the OED. At the very least, it will bring you joy to know that at one time, this was the quote used to define 'radium':
So spake Sir James Augustus Henry Murray, a key and, as it turns out, much beloved figure in the history of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and not, in fact, a nobody at all.
And yet, this quote illustrates, in a way, how I, and I reckon many others too, think of the people who write the dictionary (if we think of them at all). The dictionary is just a thing that exists, and surely has always existed. Like gravity.
Imagine my surprise that this isn't in fact the case. The dictionary had to be conceived of, then painstakingly put together, and all (gasp) without the internet!
So what did people do before you could google 'what is a balm-cricket?' or look it up in one of those books that didn't always exist purely to populate the bookcases in period films?
They wrote to Lord Tennyson to ask him, of course! Which Murray did: "I write [...] to Lord Tennyson to ask where he got the word balm-cricket and what he meant by it." (p.146)
'The Meaning of Everything' was probably the biggest surprise of the year for me, a 5-star read slipping in just under the wire for 2022.
At the time of its publication in 2003, the New York Times Book Review described it as 'supremely readable', going on to say: "The Meaning of Everything is teeming with knowledge and alive with insights. Winchester handles humor and awe with modesty and cunning."
Took the words right out of my mouth.
Author Simon Winchester's enthusiasm for the subject oozes out of every sentence, and by the time I finished it I was amazed that he'd managed to tell a complex story that spans near 100 years into 250 incredibly engaging and often hilarious bite-sized pages.
The first chapter alone is a delight, in which Winchester brings us through the history of the English language and the etymology of such words as 'sock' and 'they, them, and their'. It gives us a nice flavor of what all went on among the lexicographers as they tried to wrestle the English language into submission in Murray's scriptorium.
It's also here that he shows his hand and admits (as any decent linguist would) that English, like any language, being joyfully descriptive, has always been and always will be impossible to pin down by even the staunchest of prescriptivists:
And though George Orwell might have longed for an Anglo-Saxon revival, though John Dryden loathed French loanwords, despite Joseph Addison's campaigns against contractions such as mayn't and won't, and although Alexander Pope pleaded for the retention of dignity and Daniel Defoe wrote of his hatred of the 'inundation' of curse-words and Jonathan Swift mounted a lifelong attempt to 'fix our language forever' -- no critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. p.29
And there's joy in that.
Much later, when he writes of J.R.R. Tolkien's work on the OED, Winchester reminds us that it's this wonderful fluidity that allows for such words as 'hobbit' to enter the dictionary and keep what Samuel Johnson described as a 'terrible undertow of words' flowing and the language alive and healthy.
But though these sections early on are fascinating in their own right, when we kick off the start of the project that would become the OED, Winchester shifts gears towards highlighting the exceptionally colorful and eccentric (mostly) men who undertook what would turn out to be a lifetime of trying to get a monster of a book into the hands and homes of English speakers worldwide.
But rest assured: there are still fun morsels of information on specific words scattered throughout (apparently 'walrus' was a toughie).
I'd highly, highly recommend this book to anyone with even the most fleeting curiosity about how a dictionary is birthed, and by whom this one was brought into the world, and certainly to anyone who, like me, considers themselves an amateur bibliophile.
I know I saw myself in our central hero, Murray:
"The fact that so many of the B words had been wholly unfamiliar [...] tempted some critics to say that Murray was so slow simply because he was searching out obscurities, and was moreover doing so deliberately, to annoy and obfuscate." (p.178)
What true lover of language wouldn't have done the same in his place?
And Murray is just one in the tapestry of characters. We also get to learn of "George Perkins Marsh [...] the man who introduced the camel to the Wild West (to the rather limited degree that it has been introduced)" (p.212), and of William Chester Minor who is credited as one of the 'most celebrated of the volunteers' who worked for 21 years documenting early uses of key words from his cell at a sanitarium. And many, many more.
'The Meaning of Everything' will make you want to become a lexicographer or one of the volunteer readers who submit quotations for use in future editions of the OED. At the very least, it will bring you joy to know that at one time, this was the quote used to define 'radium':
Aristotle De P.Q.LI. xx says it may be obtained from the excrement of a squint-eyed rat that has died of a broken heart buried 50ft below the highest depths of the western ocean in a well-stopped tobacco tin, but Sir T. Browne says this is a vulgar error (p. 205)
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez
4.0
Content Warnings:
1.'Kids Who Come Back: I'm not sure why, because it has no bearing on the plot whatsoever, but this story features quite a lot of transphobic language.
2.Many of the stories deal with self-harm and suicidal ideation
3. The sub-genre of horror here is definitely 'the filthy, gross kind' with a lot of bodily fluids and rotting dead things, so if you're not into that, you would not like almost anything 'The Dangers of Smoking in Bed' has to offer.
Accolades: short-listed for the International Booker Prize in 2021
Perhaps it's just because I'm relatively new to the world of the short story anthology, but I find them very difficult to rate and review largely because I'm coming to the conclusion that they are all (maybe even somewhat by their nature) hit and miss. That is to say, every anthology I've read so far feels padded out with one or two tales that drag down my overall reading experience. One or two stories that just aren't as strong as the others.
'The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories' certainly falls into this trap for me. And (and I feel like a broken record) it's such a shame because the stories that are strong are incredibly strong and ripe for analysis, and intriguing, and disturbing, and purposeful.
Stories like 'Angelita Unearthed' and 'Where Are You, Dear Heart?' and 'Kids Who Come Back' and 'Meat' are definitely the stand outs with some of the others being certainly serviceable if not wholly impactful individually.
But then, on the other hand, there are those stories that either feel like echoes of a better counterpart or a snatch of thought rather than a complete narrative (see: 'The Dangers of Smoking in Bed). With just a bit of pruning, this collection could easily have been a 5 star read, but as it stands it loses 1 star for its bloatedness; I'm no longer feeling charitable.
Let's not dwell so on the negatives, though; let's focus on the ghoulish Argentina of Mariana Enriquez's brilliant, twisted imagination.
As a student of horror in literature and film, I'm very comfortable with the notion that horror is, in large part, the lens through which we explore and sometimes (maybe) alleviate anxiety. Think classics like 'Frankenstein' and 'Dracula,' both largely agreed to be the products of anxieties around science and the industrial revolution respectively; the crumbling of the old and the uncertainty of the new.
Filmmaker Jordan Peele creates stories like 'Get Out' and 'Candyman' as cathartic responses to and explorations of the fears and anxieties of the Black community in modern America.
The list goes on.
Now, I know incredibly little about Argentina and I've never been anywhere at all in South America, but after reading 'The Dangers of Smoking in Bed' I think I've caught at least a glimpse of what scares people there.
One major anxiety feels, to me, rather peculiar to the area she's writing about: disappearance, particularly the disappearance of children and teens. And I mean disappearance both literally (as in kids and teens being sucked into drug/human trafficking and/or being killed in the streets) and figuratively (as in: neglected or forgotten about). I can't really do a deep dive into this one due to my own lack of context, but it's definitely a super consistent theme throughout the collection that comes to a crescendo in 'Kids Who Come Back.'
The second major anxiety Enriquez explores is the anxiety around the intersections between woman and girlhood, and monstrousness. These stories (especially 'Where Are You, Dear Heart?', 'No Birthdays or Baptisms', and 'Meat') certainly hold particularities that I assume must be borne of Argentinian standards of beauty and womanhood, but a lot of it transcends that context and I imagine, would speak to women all over the world.
So what do I mean by the intersections between womanhood and monstrousness? Well, just that. The hallmarks of a successful performance of womanhood: being put-together, passive, coyly sensual, exist on less of a spectrum, and more of a teeter totter; tip those same traits just a little too far and you're no longer performing womanhood correctly, and god help any of these women. Women who break the rules suddenly become bitches, sluts, prudes, and shrews.
In Enriquez's world, that teeter totter gets slammed to the 'bad' side of 'good womanhood.' The protagonist in 'Where Are You, Dear Heart?' is a sexual deviant who only gets off to the sound of diseased heartbeats. The girls in 'Meat' take their sexual obsession with their idol to a taboo extreme. And hardly a story goes by without some hardcore female masturbation. There are also a few sexually unavailable protagonists thrown in to even things out. Put simply: Enriquez wants you to know that female sexuality is by no means limited to lying back and thinking of England. I've no doubt that many a fourth-wave feminist reader would come away from these stories thinking: 'good for her.' And if the living daylight gets scared out of any straight, cis, male reader, I reckon Enriquez would think: more's the better.
That being said, there are two stories aimed, rather pointedly I shouldn't wonder, at female readers. One, 'No Birthdays or Baptisms' very much feels like the 'rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.'
That is to say, I doubt most female or female-socialized readers would fail to feel angry reading this story. It makes painfully visible that largely unspoken frustration that you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. You're not 'supposed' to be sexual, but you are 'supposed' to let men view you sexually. It is horrific to read about Marcela being a victim of her own repressed sexuality to the degree that she brutalizes herself, just to have that very self-hatred exploited by Nico and twisted into a playground of his own sexual fantasy ('the filmed tour of Marcela's naked body lasted over half an hour. Nico told me he would have liked to lie down beside her, but he held back.')
The second, 'Woman of the Quarry' reads like a cautionary tale that speaks to the sadistic, quasi-sociopathic impulsiveness of teenagers, particularly the kind of 'hive mind' borne out of cliques of teenage girls. As My Chemical Romance put it back in 2006:
"teenagers scare the living shit out of me."
Based.
The cautionary part comes in the form of the reminder that girls victimizing other girls is just a snake biting its own tail.
There are some traces of this female solidarity undertone in some of the other stories ('Kids Who Come Back,' and 'The Well'), but Enriquez seems more intent on getting that message across by warning of the bad things that happen when women don't stick together.
There's a lot more that could be unpacked, but in summation: this is a very effective collection of horror stories that even without any kind of feminist reading are gruesome and gory and disgusting and unsettling. Moreover, this collection is what every work of horror sets out to be: it's scary as hell.
If feminist horror is your cup of tea, you may also enjoy the novel 'The Fever' by American writer Megan Abbott and 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' by Shirley Jackson.
1.'Kids Who Come Back: I'm not sure why, because it has no bearing on the plot whatsoever, but this story features quite a lot of transphobic language.
2.Many of the stories deal with self-harm and suicidal ideation
3. The sub-genre of horror here is definitely 'the filthy, gross kind' with a lot of bodily fluids and rotting dead things, so if you're not into that, you would not like almost anything 'The Dangers of Smoking in Bed' has to offer.
Accolades: short-listed for the International Booker Prize in 2021
Perhaps it's just because I'm relatively new to the world of the short story anthology, but I find them very difficult to rate and review largely because I'm coming to the conclusion that they are all (maybe even somewhat by their nature) hit and miss. That is to say, every anthology I've read so far feels padded out with one or two tales that drag down my overall reading experience. One or two stories that just aren't as strong as the others.
'The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories' certainly falls into this trap for me. And (and I feel like a broken record) it's such a shame because the stories that are strong are incredibly strong and ripe for analysis, and intriguing, and disturbing, and purposeful.
Stories like 'Angelita Unearthed' and 'Where Are You, Dear Heart?' and 'Kids Who Come Back' and 'Meat' are definitely the stand outs with some of the others being certainly serviceable if not wholly impactful individually.
But then, on the other hand, there are those stories that either feel like echoes of a better counterpart or a snatch of thought rather than a complete narrative (see: 'The Dangers of Smoking in Bed). With just a bit of pruning, this collection could easily have been a 5 star read, but as it stands it loses 1 star for its bloatedness; I'm no longer feeling charitable.
Let's not dwell so on the negatives, though; let's focus on the ghoulish Argentina of Mariana Enriquez's brilliant, twisted imagination.
As a student of horror in literature and film, I'm very comfortable with the notion that horror is, in large part, the lens through which we explore and sometimes (maybe) alleviate anxiety. Think classics like 'Frankenstein' and 'Dracula,' both largely agreed to be the products of anxieties around science and the industrial revolution respectively; the crumbling of the old and the uncertainty of the new.
Filmmaker Jordan Peele creates stories like 'Get Out' and 'Candyman' as cathartic responses to and explorations of the fears and anxieties of the Black community in modern America.
The list goes on.
Now, I know incredibly little about Argentina and I've never been anywhere at all in South America, but after reading 'The Dangers of Smoking in Bed' I think I've caught at least a glimpse of what scares people there.
One major anxiety feels, to me, rather peculiar to the area she's writing about: disappearance, particularly the disappearance of children and teens. And I mean disappearance both literally (as in kids and teens being sucked into drug/human trafficking and/or being killed in the streets) and figuratively (as in: neglected or forgotten about). I can't really do a deep dive into this one due to my own lack of context, but it's definitely a super consistent theme throughout the collection that comes to a crescendo in 'Kids Who Come Back.'
The second major anxiety Enriquez explores is the anxiety around the intersections between woman and girlhood, and monstrousness. These stories (especially 'Where Are You, Dear Heart?', 'No Birthdays or Baptisms', and 'Meat') certainly hold particularities that I assume must be borne of Argentinian standards of beauty and womanhood, but a lot of it transcends that context and I imagine, would speak to women all over the world.
So what do I mean by the intersections between womanhood and monstrousness? Well, just that. The hallmarks of a successful performance of womanhood: being put-together, passive, coyly sensual, exist on less of a spectrum, and more of a teeter totter; tip those same traits just a little too far and you're no longer performing womanhood correctly, and god help any of these women. Women who break the rules suddenly become bitches, sluts, prudes, and shrews.
In Enriquez's world, that teeter totter gets slammed to the 'bad' side of 'good womanhood.' The protagonist in 'Where Are You, Dear Heart?' is a sexual deviant who only gets off to the sound of diseased heartbeats. The girls in 'Meat' take their sexual obsession with their idol to a taboo extreme. And hardly a story goes by without some hardcore female masturbation. There are also a few sexually unavailable protagonists thrown in to even things out. Put simply: Enriquez wants you to know that female sexuality is by no means limited to lying back and thinking of England. I've no doubt that many a fourth-wave feminist reader would come away from these stories thinking: 'good for her.' And if the living daylight gets scared out of any straight, cis, male reader, I reckon Enriquez would think: more's the better.
That being said, there are two stories aimed, rather pointedly I shouldn't wonder, at female readers. One, 'No Birthdays or Baptisms' very much feels like the 'rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.'
That is to say, I doubt most female or female-socialized readers would fail to feel angry reading this story. It makes painfully visible that largely unspoken frustration that you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. You're not 'supposed' to be sexual, but you are 'supposed' to let men view you sexually. It is horrific to read about Marcela being a victim of her own repressed sexuality to the degree that she brutalizes herself, just to have that very self-hatred exploited by Nico and twisted into a playground of his own sexual fantasy ('the filmed tour of Marcela's naked body lasted over half an hour. Nico told me he would have liked to lie down beside her, but he held back.')
The second, 'Woman of the Quarry' reads like a cautionary tale that speaks to the sadistic, quasi-sociopathic impulsiveness of teenagers, particularly the kind of 'hive mind' borne out of cliques of teenage girls. As My Chemical Romance put it back in 2006:
"teenagers scare the living shit out of me."
Based.
The cautionary part comes in the form of the reminder that girls victimizing other girls is just a snake biting its own tail.
There are some traces of this female solidarity undertone in some of the other stories ('Kids Who Come Back,' and 'The Well'), but Enriquez seems more intent on getting that message across by warning of the bad things that happen when women don't stick together.
There's a lot more that could be unpacked, but in summation: this is a very effective collection of horror stories that even without any kind of feminist reading are gruesome and gory and disgusting and unsettling. Moreover, this collection is what every work of horror sets out to be: it's scary as hell.
If feminist horror is your cup of tea, you may also enjoy the novel 'The Fever' by American writer Megan Abbott and 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' by Shirley Jackson.
The Manse by Lisa W. Cantrell
4.0
"It was all the monster stories he had ever heard come to life; it was all the fears he'd ever had; it was his worst nightmares, his most horrible imaginings."
As a life-long fan of the Halloween season and all things spooky, I'm always happy when I find a story drenched in it -- none of that 'it was set on Halloween, but that's just a vaguely outlined backdrop' nonsense.
'The Manse' is a Halloween novel as much as it's a haunted house story, and author Lisa Cantrell really leaned hard into both.
In the story, a local adult youth group have established a tradition of putting together and hosting a haunted house attraction at an old mansion owned by two elderly sisters who have begrudgingly leased it to them as a means of ensuring its survival and upkeep.
Already, this is a great set-up because in a story you can make a haunted house attraction as cool as you want it to be, unlike in real life, where it would be way too expensive to pull off. And her descriptions of the various scenarios the youth group put together are definitely really cool, and part of the fun of the reading experience was the feeling of wanting very badly to visit the attraction myself. Because Cantrell well and truly let her imagination go wild, dreaming up far more abstract and weirdly creepy set-ups for rooms at a haunted house than your typical 'everything's a bit dark and actors in masks slam doors and jump out yelling 'boo!''
But, of course, this is not just a Halloween story about a haunted house attraction: this house really is haunted... or alive... we're never really let in on the answer, and to be honest, it doesn't really matter.
I'm not generally a huge fan of 'haunted house' horror, especially because in movies this usually amounts to windows and floorboards rattling, shapes flitting across the screen, culminating in physical anthropomorphic figures attacking people, or possessing people -- you know.
But in 'The Manse' Cantrell again employs her imagination to instead come up with some truly singular means for the house itself to be the monster that kills unwitting haunted-house-goers or other trespassers. The darkness is a major antagonist in the story, and it has this uncanny ability to morph into something that exists in a state between a solid and a liquid. It moves like a vine, reaching out tendrils of shadow to capture its victim, drag them into itself, and destroy them.
Fire, mist, cobwebs, and any other material it can co-opt function similarly, and yet with their own little diabolical twists.
Towards the climax, we veer to the edge of the almost Lovecraftian.
There's background intrigue of just who the twins are who own the house, the identity of a mysterious woman who hangs around sometimes, and just what it is that makes this house tick.
Right before the climax things get a tad exposition-y when it comes to the question of the sisters, and that could have used some editing down, we never really find out what the deal with the woman skulking around is other than a tenuous connection to the story of the sisters. And we also never really know what the deal with the house is: is it evil because a string of murders was committed there, or was it evil before that and somehow caused the murders?
I'm not the type to need the magic explained, but I feel like Cantrell picked secret option number three by giving enough information that it feels like it should lead up to an explanation, but then not giving the answer -- and not in the fun 'open ending' kind of way, but more so in the 'let's wrap this up quickly' kind of way.
It's not the kind of book that's inviting you to think too hard, and if you do, none of it will make sense, so best not. Much like going to a haunted house attraction in real life, part of the fun is the chaos, and the chaos was rather glorious.
I was also pretty impressed by how well she was able to juggle a fairly large cast of characters. They were all fleshed out well enough that it was easy to remember everyone, the interpersonal conflicts were believable and felt interconnected even without tying back to the house itself other than them all working there. There were no stand-outs, but everyone was serviceable, and the love triangle drama didn't take up too much space.
There was a weird bit towards the beginning when Cantrell was trying to establish that one of the main characters is Black that was…uncomfortable. He's trying to comfort a kid that got really spooked at the haunted house, but the kid is afraid of him because his skin is dark (???) and the kid mistakes him for a monster (???) and then she also uses the phrase 'he shot her a homeboy smile' more than once. So there was a bit of cringe there, but then she luckily decided to just let him be a person and stopped doing that.
All in all, I really like 'The Manse' for what it is: Halloween horror schlock for everyone who likes the spooky season. I picked it up for the cover and I got what I was after.
As a life-long fan of the Halloween season and all things spooky, I'm always happy when I find a story drenched in it -- none of that 'it was set on Halloween, but that's just a vaguely outlined backdrop' nonsense.
'The Manse' is a Halloween novel as much as it's a haunted house story, and author Lisa Cantrell really leaned hard into both.
In the story, a local adult youth group have established a tradition of putting together and hosting a haunted house attraction at an old mansion owned by two elderly sisters who have begrudgingly leased it to them as a means of ensuring its survival and upkeep.
Already, this is a great set-up because in a story you can make a haunted house attraction as cool as you want it to be, unlike in real life, where it would be way too expensive to pull off. And her descriptions of the various scenarios the youth group put together are definitely really cool, and part of the fun of the reading experience was the feeling of wanting very badly to visit the attraction myself. Because Cantrell well and truly let her imagination go wild, dreaming up far more abstract and weirdly creepy set-ups for rooms at a haunted house than your typical 'everything's a bit dark and actors in masks slam doors and jump out yelling 'boo!''
But, of course, this is not just a Halloween story about a haunted house attraction: this house really is haunted... or alive... we're never really let in on the answer, and to be honest, it doesn't really matter.
I'm not generally a huge fan of 'haunted house' horror, especially because in movies this usually amounts to windows and floorboards rattling, shapes flitting across the screen, culminating in physical anthropomorphic figures attacking people, or possessing people -- you know.
But in 'The Manse' Cantrell again employs her imagination to instead come up with some truly singular means for the house itself to be the monster that kills unwitting haunted-house-goers or other trespassers. The darkness is a major antagonist in the story, and it has this uncanny ability to morph into something that exists in a state between a solid and a liquid. It moves like a vine, reaching out tendrils of shadow to capture its victim, drag them into itself, and destroy them.
Fire, mist, cobwebs, and any other material it can co-opt function similarly, and yet with their own little diabolical twists.
Towards the climax, we veer to the edge of the almost Lovecraftian.
There's background intrigue of just who the twins are who own the house, the identity of a mysterious woman who hangs around sometimes, and just what it is that makes this house tick.
Right before the climax things get a tad exposition-y when it comes to the question of the sisters, and that could have used some editing down, we never really find out what the deal with the woman skulking around is other than a tenuous connection to the story of the sisters. And we also never really know what the deal with the house is: is it evil because a string of murders was committed there, or was it evil before that and somehow caused the murders?
I'm not the type to need the magic explained, but I feel like Cantrell picked secret option number three by giving enough information that it feels like it should lead up to an explanation, but then not giving the answer -- and not in the fun 'open ending' kind of way, but more so in the 'let's wrap this up quickly' kind of way.
It's not the kind of book that's inviting you to think too hard, and if you do, none of it will make sense, so best not. Much like going to a haunted house attraction in real life, part of the fun is the chaos, and the chaos was rather glorious.
I was also pretty impressed by how well she was able to juggle a fairly large cast of characters. They were all fleshed out well enough that it was easy to remember everyone, the interpersonal conflicts were believable and felt interconnected even without tying back to the house itself other than them all working there. There were no stand-outs, but everyone was serviceable, and the love triangle drama didn't take up too much space.
There was a weird bit towards the beginning when Cantrell was trying to establish that one of the main characters is Black that was…uncomfortable. He's trying to comfort a kid that got really spooked at the haunted house, but the kid is afraid of him because his skin is dark (???) and the kid mistakes him for a monster (???) and then she also uses the phrase 'he shot her a homeboy smile' more than once. So there was a bit of cringe there, but then she luckily decided to just let him be a person and stopped doing that.
All in all, I really like 'The Manse' for what it is: Halloween horror schlock for everyone who likes the spooky season. I picked it up for the cover and I got what I was after.
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
4.0
"Her thoughts being still chiefly fixed on what she had with such causeless terror felt and done, nothing would shortly be clearer, then that it had all been a voluntary, self-centered delusion, each trifling circumstance receiving importance from an imagination resolved on alarm, and everything forced to bend to one purpose by a mind which, before she entered the abbey, had been craving to be frightened." (p.192-193)
Northanger Abbey is, principally, a reassurance that even before the classification was officially recognized, teenagers have always been exactly the same as they are now.
From the onset of the novel, Austen positions (in a very tongue-in-cheek sort of way) our protagonist, Catherine, as not only the main character of the novel, but of life: "from fifteen to seventeen, she was in training for a heroine." (p.11)
And really, what teenager doesn't fancy themselves the hero or heroine of the world?
This notion that Catherine somewhat fancies herself life's protagonist while being blown around by outside forces and impacting the flow of events very little absolutely tracks, to humorous effect.
Because while she is content to be the hero of the story playing out in her own imagination, and delights in the idea (particularly after arriving at the titular Northanger Abbey) of bearing witness to and being the star of a Gothic novel, she is also revealed to be painfully self-conscious when real life events force her into the spotlight, and as well relatively naive when it comes to identifying the ill-will (or affection) of others towards her.
Maybe this is pure projection on my part, but that all seems to indicate a deep understanding on Jane Austen's part of the juxtaposition of main-character-syndrome and a lack of life experience swirling around inside the minds of teenagers, and those especially who are more head in the clouds than feet on the ground. Having been one of them, it was all too easy to find Catherine incredibly relatable, the two hundred years between Catherine's teenage years and mine notwithstanding.
And there's something comforting in the reassurance that people have pretty much always been the same.
Northanger Abbey wasn't at all what I expected, having had it described as 'the one where the main girlie reads too many Gothic novels and starts to think of herself as the heroine of such a novel and loses her grip on reality.' That does happen, but I wouldn't say the driving force behind the story is to satirize Gothic novels by any means; we don't even get to Northanger Abbey until halfway through the story. And even then, the mini plot as described above takes up very little space in the narrative and has little bearing on any of the major events.
But even though it ultimately doesn't matter that this happens, and even though the real plot is much more typical Austen fare: poking fun at social rules and conventions of the middle classes, a love story complicated by those rules and conventions, some misunderstandings wrapped up in those rules and conventions-- you get the idea-- it's still a charming story, and Catherine and her love interest are perfectly agreeable.
Honestly, though, even though I could see myself in Catherine, it was one of the villains of the story, her duplicitous acquaintance (for the sake of anyone who might want to read the story I won't reveal which one) that makes a better character. And even though this character's well...character is pretty vile, they (and their sibling for that matter) were incredibly entertaining in their transparent schemey-ness. The fact that Catherine couldn't see it made it all the more funny.
Really enjoyed the reading experience, so I'd consider myself satisfied at its having been my first Jane Austen. And I suspect that any precocious teenage reader of a similar disposition would really see themselves in ‘Northanger Abbey.’
Northanger Abbey is, principally, a reassurance that even before the classification was officially recognized, teenagers have always been exactly the same as they are now.
From the onset of the novel, Austen positions (in a very tongue-in-cheek sort of way) our protagonist, Catherine, as not only the main character of the novel, but of life: "from fifteen to seventeen, she was in training for a heroine." (p.11)
And really, what teenager doesn't fancy themselves the hero or heroine of the world?
This notion that Catherine somewhat fancies herself life's protagonist while being blown around by outside forces and impacting the flow of events very little absolutely tracks, to humorous effect.
Because while she is content to be the hero of the story playing out in her own imagination, and delights in the idea (particularly after arriving at the titular Northanger Abbey) of bearing witness to and being the star of a Gothic novel, she is also revealed to be painfully self-conscious when real life events force her into the spotlight, and as well relatively naive when it comes to identifying the ill-will (or affection) of others towards her.
Maybe this is pure projection on my part, but that all seems to indicate a deep understanding on Jane Austen's part of the juxtaposition of main-character-syndrome and a lack of life experience swirling around inside the minds of teenagers, and those especially who are more head in the clouds than feet on the ground. Having been one of them, it was all too easy to find Catherine incredibly relatable, the two hundred years between Catherine's teenage years and mine notwithstanding.
And there's something comforting in the reassurance that people have pretty much always been the same.
Northanger Abbey wasn't at all what I expected, having had it described as 'the one where the main girlie reads too many Gothic novels and starts to think of herself as the heroine of such a novel and loses her grip on reality.' That does happen, but I wouldn't say the driving force behind the story is to satirize Gothic novels by any means; we don't even get to Northanger Abbey until halfway through the story. And even then, the mini plot as described above takes up very little space in the narrative and has little bearing on any of the major events.
But even though it ultimately doesn't matter that this happens, and even though the real plot is much more typical Austen fare: poking fun at social rules and conventions of the middle classes, a love story complicated by those rules and conventions, some misunderstandings wrapped up in those rules and conventions-- you get the idea-- it's still a charming story, and Catherine and her love interest are perfectly agreeable.
Honestly, though, even though I could see myself in Catherine, it was one of the villains of the story, her duplicitous acquaintance (for the sake of anyone who might want to read the story I won't reveal which one) that makes a better character. And even though this character's well...character is pretty vile, they (and their sibling for that matter) were incredibly entertaining in their transparent schemey-ness. The fact that Catherine couldn't see it made it all the more funny.
Really enjoyed the reading experience, so I'd consider myself satisfied at its having been my first Jane Austen. And I suspect that any precocious teenage reader of a similar disposition would really see themselves in ‘Northanger Abbey.’
Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman
4.0
3.5 rounded up to 4
No burying the lede here: this is a cute novel that is essentially exactly what is promised in the description, so if that description sounds good to you, I doubt you'll find 'Dead Collections' disappointing.
A few key points to note, just as a bit of housekeeping:
1. The part of the description that says: "On their way to falling in love, the two traverse grief, delve into the Internet fandom they once unknowingly shared, and navigate the realities of transphobia and the stigmas of carrying the "vampire disease." They really mean it. This is very much a 'telling' and not a 'showing' kind of novel when it comes to all of the above. But this is very clearly by design. There's nothing in the writing itself that suggests author Isaac Fellman lacked the writing skills to show and not tell--it just felt like 'telling' was the point.
In the same way that a lot of early philosophy texts have the 'plot' of a bunch of people sitting around talking (I'm looking at you, 'Symposium'), 'Dead Collections' is an exploration of ideas first and foremost. There's a plot, a romance, some office drama, but even a lot of that is conveyed through dialogue or the direct inner monologue of our protagonist.
If that doesn't seem like your cup of tea, you will not like this.
2. This isn't necessarily going to blow your mind if you're already up on all the latest trans discourse, and some of that exposition might even feel incredibly basic. I'll admit that I was hoping for something a tad more nuanced, but honestly, I'm betting a lot of readers could use that kind of 'ABCs of queer discourse' (even some queer readers) so this is defintitely not a strike against it, just something that potential readers might want to know.
On with the subjective part of the review!
I really enjoyed that the characters were in their 40s. I'm still in my 20s, but my late 20s, and I feel there's a tragic lack of representation of people not in their teens and 20s in fiction like this: something largely meant to be cute and uplifting (though not with a total lack of grit). It really supports the idea that life doesn't end at 30--you can still learn about yourself and grow well into adulthood.
I'm making some assumptions here, but I'd be willing to put money on Fellman himself being in his early 40s, however, even as a younger reader I rarely felt the age difference between me and his characters. I'm not sure if this is due to the fact that despite my being on the very edge of the generation and protagonist Sol on the older side of it we're both queer Millennials in fandom, but I could easily identify with him and his love interest.
This may come as no surprise to anyone familiar with 'own voices' ficiton, but wow can you tell the difference between a trans and a cis person writing a trans character. It was so refreshing to be able to really relate to the way Fellman wrote about the FTM trans experience. The way he defined dysphoria actually made me say 'exactly!' out loud.
It's clear that Fellman has kept up with the ways in which the community has changed over the years, so that Sol's perspectives on transness aren't as stale as they might be in someone in their 40s who transitioned in the mid 2000s. And kudos to Fellman for that. There's no obligation for 'own voices' authors to give anything but their authentic perspectives on their own experiences, but going out of your way to be a part of the current conversations rather than resting on your laurals is admirable. Case in point, a big part of the story centers on a major character coming out as non-binary, a journey Fellman treats with a lot of dignity and respect even though that isn't Sol's (or perhaps his) experience.
The frank discussions about what it means to transition while in a relationship felt genuine, Sol having to learn about his partner's identity along with them was handled well. Lots of good stuff there.
My one quibble was that sometimes I wish Fellman would have made it clearer why some of the things Elsie says to Sol early on in their courtship were cringey at best. Sol gives a little pushback against being called 'butch' but then sort of pussy-foots around why that isn't appropriate. Later on, he also fails to expand on why some of the ways Elsie describes him make him (and me as the reader) squirm uncomfortably. I think there's a single line where Sol says something about it bordering on fetishization, but it happens to fast you'd blink and miss it. And then Elsie comes out as non-binary which is almost treated as a 'get out of jail free card'. I dunno, something about that whole plot-thread felt a bit off and irresponsible, especially in a novel that concerns itself so much with educating the reader on what it's like to date as a trans person.
I got the impression that Fellman was trying so hard to make sure that these characters felt like their own people while at the same time trying to be informative that he tied his own hands in some respects. Sol the character might not personally care about this, and Sol the character might not always have the best takes when it comes to non-binary identities, but Fellman the author obviously (based on how hip he is to other viewpoints he presents in the novel) knows better, and could have (and arguably should have) found a way to make that clear.
On a completely different note, I really liked that vampirism, in a novel twist, was treated as a metaphor for disability. Instead of the focus being on the traditional 'coming out as queer' narrative, we got to explore what it means to have to 'come out' as disabled. I'm not in that community, so I can't speak to the authenticity of how Fellman portrays that experience, but it's certainly an important topic to take on because I know from my disabled friends that 'pass' as able-bodied just how frustrating and humiliating and traumatizing it can be to be outed or forced to come out as a disabled person in a society that isn't always that accomodating of the spectrum of 'ability'.
A good example of this is how Sol, as a vampire, struggles to exist comfortably in a world that just isn't set up for people with his needs. For instance, because he can't be out in the sunlight, he can only work jobs at night or in buildings without windows. And of course, most jobs are daytime jobs and almost all buildings have windows. That he has to ask for special accommodation only to recieve a lot of eye-rolling and sighing and 'well that sounds like a you problem' from his workplace definitely feels very evocative of issues of accessibility and flexibility in our real world.
Wheelchair accessibility comes to mind.
Adding a ramp to allow wheelchair access to a building doesn't require that much effort on the part of businesses, and yet so often buildings are not wheelchair accessible by design, putting the burden on wheelchair users to either struggle, give up, or complain.
Not that the discussion is limited to physical disability by any means; I think this metaphor tracks well with what I know of the neuro-divergant experience and treatment as well.
I almost feel like this commentary on disability and the ways people with disabilities are often treated was the Trojan Horse of 'Dead Collections' because nowhere in any of the marketing is that idea mentioned, and the words 'disability' or 'access' are never used in the text, but it's such an excellent, novel way to use vampirism as a metaphor.
I'm curious what readers from those communities think about this novel, and if it indeed resonates with them.
No burying the lede here: this is a cute novel that is essentially exactly what is promised in the description, so if that description sounds good to you, I doubt you'll find 'Dead Collections' disappointing.
A few key points to note, just as a bit of housekeeping:
1. The part of the description that says: "On their way to falling in love, the two traverse grief, delve into the Internet fandom they once unknowingly shared, and navigate the realities of transphobia and the stigmas of carrying the "vampire disease." They really mean it. This is very much a 'telling' and not a 'showing' kind of novel when it comes to all of the above. But this is very clearly by design. There's nothing in the writing itself that suggests author Isaac Fellman lacked the writing skills to show and not tell--it just felt like 'telling' was the point.
In the same way that a lot of early philosophy texts have the 'plot' of a bunch of people sitting around talking (I'm looking at you, 'Symposium'), 'Dead Collections' is an exploration of ideas first and foremost. There's a plot, a romance, some office drama, but even a lot of that is conveyed through dialogue or the direct inner monologue of our protagonist.
If that doesn't seem like your cup of tea, you will not like this.
2. This isn't necessarily going to blow your mind if you're already up on all the latest trans discourse, and some of that exposition might even feel incredibly basic. I'll admit that I was hoping for something a tad more nuanced, but honestly, I'm betting a lot of readers could use that kind of 'ABCs of queer discourse' (even some queer readers) so this is defintitely not a strike against it, just something that potential readers might want to know.
On with the subjective part of the review!
I really enjoyed that the characters were in their 40s. I'm still in my 20s, but my late 20s, and I feel there's a tragic lack of representation of people not in their teens and 20s in fiction like this: something largely meant to be cute and uplifting (though not with a total lack of grit). It really supports the idea that life doesn't end at 30--you can still learn about yourself and grow well into adulthood.
I'm making some assumptions here, but I'd be willing to put money on Fellman himself being in his early 40s, however, even as a younger reader I rarely felt the age difference between me and his characters. I'm not sure if this is due to the fact that despite my being on the very edge of the generation and protagonist Sol on the older side of it we're both queer Millennials in fandom, but I could easily identify with him and his love interest.
This may come as no surprise to anyone familiar with 'own voices' ficiton, but wow can you tell the difference between a trans and a cis person writing a trans character. It was so refreshing to be able to really relate to the way Fellman wrote about the FTM trans experience. The way he defined dysphoria actually made me say 'exactly!' out loud.
It's clear that Fellman has kept up with the ways in which the community has changed over the years, so that Sol's perspectives on transness aren't as stale as they might be in someone in their 40s who transitioned in the mid 2000s. And kudos to Fellman for that. There's no obligation for 'own voices' authors to give anything but their authentic perspectives on their own experiences, but going out of your way to be a part of the current conversations rather than resting on your laurals is admirable. Case in point, a big part of the story centers on a major character coming out as non-binary, a journey Fellman treats with a lot of dignity and respect even though that isn't Sol's (or perhaps his) experience.
The frank discussions about what it means to transition while in a relationship felt genuine, Sol having to learn about his partner's identity along with them was handled well. Lots of good stuff there.
My one quibble was that sometimes I wish Fellman would have made it clearer why some of the things Elsie says to Sol early on in their courtship were cringey at best. Sol gives a little pushback against being called 'butch' but then sort of pussy-foots around why that isn't appropriate. Later on, he also fails to expand on why some of the ways Elsie describes him make him (and me as the reader) squirm uncomfortably. I think there's a single line where Sol says something about it bordering on fetishization, but it happens to fast you'd blink and miss it. And then Elsie comes out as non-binary which is almost treated as a 'get out of jail free card'. I dunno, something about that whole plot-thread felt a bit off and irresponsible, especially in a novel that concerns itself so much with educating the reader on what it's like to date as a trans person.
I got the impression that Fellman was trying so hard to make sure that these characters felt like their own people while at the same time trying to be informative that he tied his own hands in some respects. Sol the character might not personally care about this, and Sol the character might not always have the best takes when it comes to non-binary identities, but Fellman the author obviously (based on how hip he is to other viewpoints he presents in the novel) knows better, and could have (and arguably should have) found a way to make that clear.
On a completely different note, I really liked that vampirism, in a novel twist, was treated as a metaphor for disability. Instead of the focus being on the traditional 'coming out as queer' narrative, we got to explore what it means to have to 'come out' as disabled. I'm not in that community, so I can't speak to the authenticity of how Fellman portrays that experience, but it's certainly an important topic to take on because I know from my disabled friends that 'pass' as able-bodied just how frustrating and humiliating and traumatizing it can be to be outed or forced to come out as a disabled person in a society that isn't always that accomodating of the spectrum of 'ability'.
A good example of this is how Sol, as a vampire, struggles to exist comfortably in a world that just isn't set up for people with his needs. For instance, because he can't be out in the sunlight, he can only work jobs at night or in buildings without windows. And of course, most jobs are daytime jobs and almost all buildings have windows. That he has to ask for special accommodation only to recieve a lot of eye-rolling and sighing and 'well that sounds like a you problem' from his workplace definitely feels very evocative of issues of accessibility and flexibility in our real world.
Wheelchair accessibility comes to mind.
Adding a ramp to allow wheelchair access to a building doesn't require that much effort on the part of businesses, and yet so often buildings are not wheelchair accessible by design, putting the burden on wheelchair users to either struggle, give up, or complain.
Not that the discussion is limited to physical disability by any means; I think this metaphor tracks well with what I know of the neuro-divergant experience and treatment as well.
I almost feel like this commentary on disability and the ways people with disabilities are often treated was the Trojan Horse of 'Dead Collections' because nowhere in any of the marketing is that idea mentioned, and the words 'disability' or 'access' are never used in the text, but it's such an excellent, novel way to use vampirism as a metaphor.
I'm curious what readers from those communities think about this novel, and if it indeed resonates with them.
Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge
3.0
3.5 rounded down to 3
I listened to the audiobook version, and the narrator had the perfect voice for this particular story, so if you're an audiobook-er, definitely give it a go.
Having won the Bram Stoker Award back in 2006, I did have rather high hopes for 'Dark Harvest' and for the most part, I wasn't disappointed. As many others have pointed out, Partridge definitely took inspiration from 'The Lottery' when constructing this story, though it was by no means derivative. I would add that something like 'Battle Royale' also comes to mind.
The central figure of the story, the 'October Boy' is a brilliant addition to the pantheon of Halloween monsters (with a twist!) and the descriptions of him were some of the best parts of the novel. The October Boy is this incredibly imaginative figure, part scarecrow with his limbs of vine and topped with a pumpkin head. The added touch of being stuffed with Halloween candy lends itself to the singular analogy of candy filling to blood that comes into play during the climax.
Lyrical in a way that sometimes verged on beatnik territory, this is a writing style that won't be for everyone, though fans of Ray Bradbury's style, especially in 'The Halloween Tree', would likely appreciate it as adding to rather than distracting from the tale itself.
Once we get to the 'twist' section (which, frankly, occurs relatively early on in the story) I started to somewhat lose steam. This comes down to taste, and I think I was looking more for a Halloween monster story rather than a parable, so just be aware that this is very like 'The Lottery' in that sense.
The characters are all serviceable if not particularly memorable, and again, I think the strengths of 'Dark Harvest' leaned heavily on its aesthetics (writing style, setting, season).
A good addition to 'Halloween' horror, and probably particularly good for readers who want something seasonal and spooky with a little bit of blood and guts, but without having to subject themselves to an all-out gore-fest typical of the slasher genre.
I listened to the audiobook version, and the narrator had the perfect voice for this particular story, so if you're an audiobook-er, definitely give it a go.
Having won the Bram Stoker Award back in 2006, I did have rather high hopes for 'Dark Harvest' and for the most part, I wasn't disappointed. As many others have pointed out, Partridge definitely took inspiration from 'The Lottery' when constructing this story, though it was by no means derivative. I would add that something like 'Battle Royale' also comes to mind.
The central figure of the story, the 'October Boy' is a brilliant addition to the pantheon of Halloween monsters (with a twist!) and the descriptions of him were some of the best parts of the novel. The October Boy is this incredibly imaginative figure, part scarecrow with his limbs of vine and topped with a pumpkin head. The added touch of being stuffed with Halloween candy lends itself to the singular analogy of candy filling to blood that comes into play during the climax.
Lyrical in a way that sometimes verged on beatnik territory, this is a writing style that won't be for everyone, though fans of Ray Bradbury's style, especially in 'The Halloween Tree', would likely appreciate it as adding to rather than distracting from the tale itself.
Once we get to the 'twist' section (which, frankly, occurs relatively early on in the story) I started to somewhat lose steam. This comes down to taste, and I think I was looking more for a Halloween monster story rather than a parable, so just be aware that this is very like 'The Lottery' in that sense.
The characters are all serviceable if not particularly memorable, and again, I think the strengths of 'Dark Harvest' leaned heavily on its aesthetics (writing style, setting, season).
A good addition to 'Halloween' horror, and probably particularly good for readers who want something seasonal and spooky with a little bit of blood and guts, but without having to subject themselves to an all-out gore-fest typical of the slasher genre.