Tag Archives: Fiction

March 3, 2023 · 12:01 am

Don’t Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones

book cover

Dark Mill South’s Reunion Tour began on December 12th, 2019, a Thursday. Thirty-six hours and twenty bodies later, on Friday the 13th, it would be over.

…souls are like livers: they regenerate and regenerate, until you’ve finally poisoned them enough that the only thing they can do is kill you…

First, while I suppose it is possible to read Don’t Fear the Reaper as a stand-alone, I would not advise it. It is the second entry in The Lake Witch Trilogy. I mean, would you read The Two Towers without having first read The Fellowship of the Ring? Sure, Jones fills in enough details here that you could get by, maybe. But why would you want to? There is too much from the first book that you should know before heading into this one. So, if you have not yet read book #1, My Heart is a Chainsaw, settle back in your favorite reading spot, have a go at that one first, then head back here.

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Stephen Graham Jones – image from The Big Thrill

Well, it had been a quiet week in Proofrock, Idaho, “the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve.” But it somehow makes itself the Cabot Cove of slasherdom. A chapter walks us through the place’s dodgy past, which culminated in the Independence Day Massacre of Book #1, four years before Book #2 picks up.

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Michael Myers of Halloween – image from Vulture

Jennifer Daniels, Jennifer, not Jade, Jennifer, the kick-ass final girl last time, is out of jail, but only if she can keep from destroying any more government property (as if). It just so happens that there is an epically murderous killer also just out of jail, but not from having been released. Dark Mill South is not a typical name for a killer, for anyone really. But then his killings are not usual either, offering, in addition to severe personal carnage, the placing of bodies facing north. He is supposedly seeking revenge for the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men in 1862. And, in a nod no doubt, to urban legends, DMS is short one hand, while being plus one hook. A very large, burly person as well, up past 6’5” Jason Voorhees, giving him the BMOC title for slashers. Whoo-hoo! And unlike the main killer of book #1, DMS is an actual flesh-and-blood (lots of blood) monstrosity, not an ageless spook. He can be killed.

He wasn’t meant to make it as far as he does in the book. The way I initially conceived him, he was gonna be this big bad killer who comes to town, and then within a matter of minutes, he gets put down. But then I built him too bad. He couldn’t be put down easily. – from The Big Thrill interview

Even wildlife gets involved in this one. Not the first time of course. Jones did present a vengeful ungulate in The Only Good Indians, and unhappy ursines were a presence in My Heart is a Chainsaw.

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Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th – image from Vulture

It will give Jade, no, Jennifer, Jennifer, sheesh, the opportunity to go all Final Girl again, but she would rather not, thanks. Who will she identify as the FG this time?

Her fingernails aren’t painted black, and her boots are the dress-ones her lawyer bought for her. The heels are conservative, there are no aggressive lugs on the soles, and the threads are the same dark brown color as the fake, purply-brown leather.

She has gone mainstream, even has long, healthy (Indian) hair now, and a passel of credits from community college correspondence courses. She is back in town after five years of dealing with the justice system from the wrong side of the bars. It is ten degrees, and there is a nasty winter storm making it tough to get around, effectively isolating Proofrock, and it’s unwelcome visitor. The local population will be compressed into a smaller piece of town, as survivors congregate where they might gain some security.

The bodies start piling up in short order, a range of unpleasantries foisted upon them, the local constabulary, per usual in slasher tales, offering a somewhat less than totally effective level of protection to the community.

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Jigsaw – of Saw – Image from IGN

At age 17, Jade (yes, she was Jade then) offered us a tutorial on slasher norms. And saw how what was happening in her town fit the slasher-film norms (maybe should be ab-norms?) Her encyclopedic knowledge of the genre gave her an edge, allowed her to predict the future by looking at what had been produced in the cinematic past. This was done in chapters titled Slasher 101. That has been much reduced here. Although there are a few essay chapters in which a student writes to her teacher about similar subject matter, replicating the Jade-Holmes connection. Additional intel is presented through several characters who share Jennifer’s encyclopedic knowledge of the genre.

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Freddie Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street – image from Vulture

As with its predecessor, DFtR is an homage to the slasher film genre, particularly the product of the late 20th century golden age. I thought about keeping track of the films named, but it was soon clear that this was a fool’s errand. Like Lieutenant Dunbar says in Dances with Wolves, when Kicking Bird asks how many white men will be coming, they are like the stars. I enjoy slasher films as much as most of you, but am not a maven, by any stretch. One can enjoy this book without being familiar with ALLLLL of the gazillion films that are mentioned, but it did detract from the fun of reading this to feel as if the slasher film experts were passing notes behind my back, and that I was missing the significance of this or that flick nod. Sure, some explanations are offered, but the book would have to be twice as long to explain all of the references, in addition to the dead weight it would have added to the forward progress of the story.

There was almost no weight to be added for this novel.

Never planned on My Heart is a Chainsaw being the first installment of a trilogy, nope. But then in revisions, Joe Monti, my editor at Saga, said… what if everybody wasn’t dead at the end?
I hemmed and hawed, didn’t want to leave anyone standing, but gave it a shot anyway. And it worked, was amazing. And it meant Chainsaw felt like it wanted to now open up to a trilogy, which I think is the most natural form for a slasher to take. – from The Lineup interview

But Jones did not roll out bed knowing how to structure, to write a trilogy, so he studied some of his favorite film series, Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, to see how it is done. He also corralled a novel into his self-study class and learned a lot, particularly on handling multiple character POVs.

I wrote Don’t Fear The Reaper right at the end of rereading Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. And that’s in parts, and each part introduces a new character and then it goes into everything else. And it cycles through all their heads. So that’s what I tried to do in Don’t Fear the Reaper—-and following that model was really productive. I don’t think I could have written Don’t Fear the Reaper if I hadn’t just come out of Lonesome Dove. – from the Paste Magazine interview

Part of that cycling includes a peek inside the squirrelly brain of DMS, who, at one point, is in pursuit of two females and relishing the thought of skinning them both alive in a creative way.

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Leather Face – of Texas Chainsaw Massacre – image from Texas Monthly

There is some other pretty weird material in this one that might take up residence in your nightmares, substances that may or may not be real, that may be or may become human, or humanoid, or some sort of living creature. Thankfully, we do not see things through their eyes. (do they even have eyes?)

Many horror products, films, movies, TV shows, et al, get by with a simple surfacy fright-fest, counting bodies and maybe indulging in creative ways of killing, but the better ones add a layer. Jones looks at things from a Native American perspective, as well as that of a serious slasher-movie fan. Not only is Jennifer a Native American final girl (well, she was in the prior book anyway. We do not know straight away if she will be forced to reprise the role this time.) The Jason-esque killer is a Native American as well. Inclusion all around. As noted above, the literary references SGJ favors are to slasher films, but he is not above tossing in more classical literary references. I particularly enjoyed:

In the summer of 2015 a rough beast slouched out of the shadows and into the waking nightmares of an unsuspecting world. His name was Dark Mill South, but that wasn’t the only name he went by.

Jones is offering here a reference to a world famous poem by William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, which ends with an end-times image (what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?) of a nightmare realized. (You can read the poem in EXTRA STUFF) It will certainly be end-times for many residents of Proofrock.

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Ghostface – of Scream – image from Variety

One of the underlying elements of the slasher story is that it is a bubble inside which some form of justice will be meted out.

Now in 2023, I think the reason we’ve been into slashers the last few years….I think the 24-hour news cycle has greatly contributed to that, and also the election in 2016 that resulted in the news feeding us daily images, hourly images of people doing terrible things at podiums, at rallies, and then walking away unscathed. And what the slasher gives us is the ability to engage for two hours, for six hours, whatever, a world that is brutally fair. A world where if you do something wrong, you’re getting your head chopped off. That sense of fairness is so alluring to us – from the Paste interview

Maybe not so alluring for the collateral victims who clog up the streets, buildings, and waterways, but there is usually some justifiable revenge taking place. Bullies get comeuppance, which is always satisfying.

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Pinhead – of Hellraiser – image from Wired

While Jade/Jennifer does not get our total attention this time ‘round, she remains our primary POV in a town where, really, not all the women are strong, only some of the men are good-looking, and a fair number of the children are, well, different. She is a great lead, having proven her mettle in Book #1, an outsider, that weird kid, charged with challenging a mortal assault on the residents of her town, her superpower her scary knowledge of slasher canon, and a hefty reservoir of guts. Rooting for Jade/Jennifer is as easy as falling off a log, but hopefully without the dire consequences such an event might have in Indian Lake. You will love her to pieces. There are plenty of twists and surprises to keep you in the story. There is creepiness to make you look around your home just to make sure everything is ok. There is a semi’s worth of blood and gore, a bit more tutorial on the genre, and the action is relentless. Once you begin this series one thing is certain. You are sure to get hooked.

slashers never really die. They just go to sleep for a few years. But they’re always counting the days until round two.

Review posted – 3/3/23

Publication date – 2/7/23

I received an ARE of Don’t Fear the Reaper from Gallery / Saga Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages

Interviews
—–The Big Thrill – Between the Lines: Stephen Graham Jones by April Snellings
—–Esquire – How Stephen Graham Jones Is Reinventing the Slasher By Neil Mcrobert
—–Gizmodo – Horror Author Stephen Graham Jones on His Latest Chiller, Don’t Fear the Reaper by Cheryl Eddy
—–The Lineup – Cut to the Heart: An Interview with Stephen Graham Jones/a> by Mackenzie Kiera
—–Litreactor – Stephen Graham Jones on Trilogies, Deaths, Slashers, and Dog Nipples by Gabino Iglesias
—-* Paste Magazine – Stephen Graham Jones Talks Final Girls, Middle Books, and Don’t Fear the Reaper by Lacy Baugher Milas – This is primo material

Paste Magazine: So, the title Don’t Fear The Reaper —which is one of my favorite songs, by the way—I’m assuming that must come from Blue Oyster Cult.
Stephen Graham Jones: Well, it does come from Blue Oyster Cult, but really it’s that—in Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis and her friend are riding in her friend’s Monte Carlo, and they’re listening to (Don’t Fear) The Reaper, and then in 1996 with Scream, a cover of Don’t Fear) The Reaper is playing over Billy and Sid, and so it seemed like that was a kind of momentum. I had no choice but to call it Don’t Fear The Reaper, I was going to honor my heroes. Stephen Graham Jones on Writing, the Pantheon of Horror, and Clowns by Leah Schnelbach – nada on Reaper

If you want even more interviews with SGJ, I posted a bunch in my review of My Heart is a Chainsaw. There are plenty more contemporary (2023) interviews to be had if you feel the urge.

Songs/Music
—–Blue Oyster Cult – Don’t Fear the Reaper
—–Largehearted boy – Stephen Graham Jones’s Playlist for His Novel “Don’t Fear the Reaper”

My reviews of (sadly, only three) previous books by Jones
—–2021 – My Heart is a Chainsaw – on Coot’s Reviews
—–2020 – The Only Good Indians
—–2016 – Mongrels

Items of Interest
—–Pop Culture – Horror Movie Characters – includes stats on them
—–William Butler Yeats – The Second Coming

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Filed under Fiction, Horror, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Thriller

Tagged as Fiction, horror, indigenous, Mystery, Suspense

February 24, 2023 · 12:01 am

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

book cover

Perseus…has no interest in the well being of any creature if it impedes his desire to do whatever he wants. He is a vicious little thug and the sooner you grasp that, and stop thinking of him as a brave boy hero, the closer you’ll be to understanding what actually happened.

Who decides what is a monster?

When Natalie Haynes wrote Pandora’s Jar, a collection of ten essays on the women in Greek myths, she included a chapter on Medusa. In nine-thousand words she offered a non-standard view of the story of heroic Perseus slaying the gorgon. But the story stayed with her, well, the rage about the story of how ill-treated this supposed monster had been, anyway. If the feeling remained that powerful for so long, it was a message. She needed to devote a full book to this outrage in order to get any peace. Thus Stone Blind.

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Natalie Haynes – image from Hay Festival

We learn how Medusa came by her notable do. After being sexually assaulted by Poseidon in one of Athena’s temples, the goddess was appalled. No, not by the rape. I mean a god’s gotta do what a god’s gotta do. But that he raped Medusa in Athena’s temple! Desecration! Well, that cannot go unpunished. So, Athena seeks revenge on Poseidon by assaulting Medusa, figuring, we guess, that this might make Poseidon sad, or something. Uses her goddess powers to turn Medusa’s hair to snakes and her eyes to weapons of mass destruction. Any living creature she looks at will be lithified.

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Image from Mythopedia – Head of Medusa by Peter Paul Rubens – 1618

Then there is the other half of this tale, Perseus. We are treated to his dodgy beginnings, another godly sexual assault. He is not portrayed here as the hero so many ancient writings proclaim. Decent enough kid, living with his mom, Danae, and a stepfather sort, until mom is threatened with being forcibly married to the local king, a total douche. Junior tries to make a deal to get her out of it, said douche sending him on a seemingly impossible quest. Good luck, kid. I mean, seriously, how in hell can he hope to bring back a gorgon’s head?

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Image from Ancient Origins

Zeus feels a need to help the kid out. I mean, Perseus may be a bastard, but hey, in Greek mythology, that would put him in the majority. Am I right? Still, he is Zeus’s bastard, so Pop does what he can to help him out, sending along two gods to coach and aid the lad as needed. Hermes and Athena snark all over Perseus, pointing out his many weaknesses and flaws, while providing some very real assistance. They may not hold the kid in high regard, but neither can they piss off the boss. Very high school gym, and totally hilarious.

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Image from Wiki – Perseus Turning Phineus and his followers to stone by Luca Giordano – 1680s

Which should not be terribly surprising. Haynes is not just an author and classicist, but a stand-up comedian. You can glean what you need to know about her comedic career from the Historical Archivist interview linked in EXTRA STUFF. There is plenty of humor beside godly dissing of Perseus. Athena (referred to as Athene in the book) tries to talk an unnamed mortal into signing on to a huge battle between the Olympian gods and the Giants, new powerhouse versus the current champs. It is clearly a tough sell.

‘If you get trodden on by a giant or a god – which wouldn’t be intentional on our part, incidentally – but in the heat of battle one of us might step in the wrong place and there you’d be. . . . Well, would have been. Anyway, it would be painless. Probably very painful just before it was painless, but not for long.’… ‘Come on. If you do die, I’ll put in a word for you to get a constellation. Promise.’

There are plenty more like these, including a particularly shocking approach to relieving a really bad headache.

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Image from Scary For Kids (reminds me of the nun I had for eighth grade)

But the whole quest experience uncovers Perseus’s inner god-like inclinations. He becomes an entitled rich kid with far too many high-powered connections helping him out. And develops a taste for slaughter. When Andromeda sees a knight in shining armor, come to save her from certain death by sea monster, her parents suggest that “Maybe, Sweetie, you might consider how gleeful he was when he was murdering defenseless people?” Or noting that if he had really been solid on keeping promises he might have headed straight home to save his mom with that snaky head instead of stopping off to frolic in blood for a few days. “This boy’s gonna be trouble, Andy.”

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Image from Classical Literature

The gods have issues. The Housewives of Olympus could well include some unspeakable husbands, who seem to have a thing for forcing themselves on whomever (or whatever) catches their eye. As a group they are always on the lookout for slights, insults, or minor border transgressions. What a bunch of whiny bitches! But with power, unfortunately, to make life unspeakable for us mere mortals, whose life expectancy is not even a rounding error to their eternal foolishness. Medusa, in that way, was one of us. There is uncertainty about Perseus.

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Image from Talking Humanities

Sisters abound. Apparently, triple-sister deities was a thing for the ancient Greeks. We are treated to POVs from Medusa’s two gorgon sibs, and look on as Perseus hoodwinks the three hapless Graiai sisters, who are doomed to having to share a single eye and a single tooth among them. (Could you please wipe that thing off before you pass it along?) The Nereids are more numerous (50) and a bit of a dark force here.

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From Greek Legends and Myths – by Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901)

Never one to stick to a single POV, Haynes offers us many discrete perspectives over seventy-five chapters. Fifteen are one-offs. The Gorgoneion leads the pack with thirteen chapters, followed by Athene with eleven, Andromeda with eight and Medusa with seven. There are some unusual POVs in the mix, a talking head (no, not David Byrne), a crow, and an olive tree among them. Haynes dips into omniscient narrator mode for a handful of chapters as well.

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Image From Empire

As noted in EXTRA STUFF, there is a particularly offensive sculpture of Perseus holding Medusa’s severed head. Not only has he murdered her, he is standing on her corpse. You can see how this would piss off a classicist who knows that Medusa never hurt anyone. Damage done by her death-gaze was inadvertent or done by others using her head as a weapon. And this supposedly brave warrior killed this woman in her sleep. Studly, no? And with all sorts of magical help from his father’s peeps. What a guy!

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Image from Smithsonian American art Museum – by Lucien Levy-Dhurmer – 1915

Natalie Haynes set out to tell Medusa’s story, and it is completely clear by the end that the monstrosity here is the treatment this innocent female mortal received, at the hands of abusers both male and female. Haynes keeps the story rolling with the diverse perspectives and short chapters, so that even if you remember most of the classic myth there will be plenty of mythological history you never knew. You will also laugh out loud, which is a pretty good trick for what is really a #METOO novel. The abuse of the powerless, of women in particular, by the powerful has been going on only forever. Haynes has made clear just how the stories we have told for thousands of years reinforce, and even celebrate, that abuse. Next up for her, fiction-wise, is Medea. I can’t wait.

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Image from Smithsonian American Art Museum – by Alice Pike Barney – 1892

Medusa may not have been a goddess, but it seems quite clear that Natalie Haynes is. This is a wonderful read, not to be missed.

He’s just a bag of meat wandering round, irritating people.’

Review posted – 02/24/23

Publication dates – Hardcover
———-UK – September 15, 2022 Mantle
———-USA – February 7, 2021 – Harper

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads. Stop by and say Hi!

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Image from Wiki by Caravaggio – 1597

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and Instagram pages

Interviews
—–The Bookseller – Natalie Haynes on challenging patriarchal historical narratives and championing female voices by Alice O’Keeffe
—–CBC – Natalie Haynes on the fantastic and fearsome women of Greek myth
—–LDJ Historical Archivist – Brick Classicist of the Year 2023 Natalie Haynes – video – 16:46 – this is delicious
—–Harvard Bookstore – Natalie Haynes discusses “Stone Blind” – video 1:03:55 – – This is amazing! So much info. You will learn a lot here.

My review of other work by the author
—–2021 (USA) – A Thousand Ships – Helen of Troy and the women of the Homeric epics

Items of Interest
—–Wiki on Gorgoneion
—–The Page 69 Test – Stone Blind – a bit of fluff
—–Widewalls – An Icon of Justice – Or Something Else? A New Medusa in a NYC Park – interesting contemporary sculptural response to a classical outrage.

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Left: Benvenuto Cellini – Perseus holding the head of Medusa, 1545–1554. Image creative commons / Right: Luciano Garbati – Medusa With The Head of Perseus, 2008-2020. Installed at Collect Pond Park. Courtesy of MWTH Project – images and text from Widewalls article
The MWTH (Medusa with the head) image is sometimes accompanied by the ff: “Be thankful we only want equality and not payback.”

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Filed under Fantasy, Feminism, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

Tagged as feminist, Fiction, historical-fiction, literary-fiction, metoo, mythology

February 17, 2023 · 12:01 am

The Last Chairlift by John Irving

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Think of your first good kiss. Was it life-changing, or was it no big deal? Do you remember how old you were? Did it matter, at the time, who gave it to you? Do you even remember who it was?
I’ll tell you this: when you’re thirteen and your mother gives you your first good kiss, you better hope someone matches it or eclipses it—soon. That’s your only hope.

Autobiography just isn’t good or bad enough to work as fiction… Unrevised, real life is just a mess.

The overall format is one of a frame, with Adam Brewster opening by letting us know that this is the story of his life and times, then returning to turn out the lights when the tale has been completed. It is a family saga of Irving’s era, 50’s 60s, (Vietnam) 70s, 80s (Reagan, AIDS) et al, to the mad, reactionary violence of the 21st century. Adam Brewster, a writer and screenwriter, is our narrator for a look at the sexual politics of a lifetime, from his birth in 1941 to his later days some eighty years on.

Adam’s mother, Rachel Brewster (Little Ray), was a nearly-pro ski nut, who spent large parts of every year on the slopes, settling for work as an instructor. That left Adam in the hands of his grandmother for much of his upbringing, assisted by a passel of relations. He would hunger for time with his only known parent for much of his life, a core element of the novel.

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John Irving – image from Outside Magazine

Readers of John Irving will recognize much that is familiar, from his prior work and his life. The novel is set in Exeter, New Hampshire, Irving’s home town; includes a benign stepparent teaching at Phillips Exeter (as his actual stepfather did); includes the narrator as a student there. Yep, Irving attended. There is wrestling, of course. Bears are limited to a kind of snowshoe shaped like their paws. A hotel figures large. There is an absent biological father, (Irving’s father was in the US Army Air Force. He never met him.); a mother with too many secrets; there is also reference made to an inappropriate relationship between an adult woman and an underage boy. (something Irving himself experienced); considerable attention is directed to feeling like, to being, an outsider.

”That’s just who you are, Adam,” my older cousin said. “There’s a foreignness inside you—beginning with where you come from. The foreignness is in you—that’s just who you are. You and me and Ray—we’re outliers.”

In fact, Irving turns the tables here, as Adam, as the only straight among the main characters, is the outsider in his own family, always the last to get things, he is nonetheless loved and supported by his sexually diverse relations.

His mother’s lifelong lover, Molly, effectively his stepmother, tells Adam, “There’s more than one way to love people, Kid.” It serves as a core message for the book and for Irving’s oeuvre. One of the main characters is transgender. He first wrote a sympathetic trans character in The World According to Garp, in 1978. So, when his son, born many years after the book was published, came out to his parents as trans, she knew her father would be completely supportive.

The politics of divergent sexuality through time manifests in diverse venues. Raucous comedic material performed at a comedy club in one era is considered too much for a later sensibility, a new puritanism of correctness. Safety for being different is a concern. Adam is very worried when his stepfather is out in their town dressed as a woman, even trails him sometimes in case a backup is needed. Reagan’s unwillingness to address AIDS until six years into his presidency is noted. Acceptance increases over time, but increased acceptance sparks increased resistance. A performer of material deemed unacceptable to some becomes a target for violence in a more disturbed climate.

In addition to the overarching theme of looking at sexual politics, sexuality is shown as far less important than the connection between people. Things that may seem sexual actually have a lot less to do with sex than connection. For instance, Adam and his mother often sleep together, in the slumbering, not biblical sense, well past the age where that is generally deemed ok. There is another relationship in which a straight man and a gay woman share a bed, sans fooling around.

There is hilarity aplenty, not least with Adam’s young sequence of damaged or damaging lovers. Lots of cringy LOL material there. I counted a dozen “LOLs” in my notes, some for entire chapters.

And then there are ghosts. Irving calls this a ghost story. I refer you to a piece on his site that addresses this directly.

Ghosts don’t just warn us about the future; they remind us of what we’ve forgotten about the past. All this is to say, I have a history of being interested in ghosts. And here come the ghosts again. In my new novel…the ghosts are more prominent than before; the ghosts, or hints of ghosts, begin and end the novel.

We all have ghosts we live with, but the ones here are visible, well, to some, anyway. They hang out in large numbers at a hotel in Aspen, but also turn up at home. The spectres are historical and familial, with some able to interact with the physical world (sometimes with LOL results) sometimes condemned to remain non-impactful. They do indeed, as noted above, remind us of the past, sometimes darkly so, but some offer direction and comfort. And Irving uses his behemoth of a novel to keep generating new ones. They pass over in a wide range of ways; lightning, murder on a stage, sudden avalanche, cancer, suicide, murder in a hotel, falling from a chairlift, leaping from a chairlift, death in war, et al. Falkner famously said “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.” I guess it could be said for many characters in The Last Chairlift that even the dead are never entirely dead.

Adam’s profession offers ample opportunity for Irving (winner of a National Book Award AND a screenwriting Oscar) to present a wealth of material about writing, both for the screen and for print.

“My life could be a movie,” you hear people say, but what do they mean? Don’t they mean their lives are too incredible to be real—too unbelievably good or bad? “My life could be a movie” means you think movies are both less than realistic and more than you can expect from real life. “My life could be a movie” means you think your life has been special enough to get made as a movie; it means you think your life has been spectacularly blessed or cursed.
But my life is a movie, and not for the usual self-congratulatory or self-pitying reasons. My life is a movie because I’m a screenwriter. I’m first and foremost a novelist, but even when I write a novel, I’m a visualizer—I’m seeing the story unfold as if it were already on film.

Imagining the stories you want to write, and waiting to write them, is part of the writing process—like thinking about the characters you want to create, but not creating them. Yet when I did this, when I was just a kid at Exeter—when I thought about writing all the time, but I never finished anything I was writing—this amounted to little more than daydreaming.

you don’t see with hindsight in a first draft. You have to finish the first draft to see what you’ve missed.

Fiction writers like what we call truthful exaggeration. When we write about something that really happened—or it almost happened, could have happened—we just enhance what happened. Essentially, the story remains real, but we make it better than it truly was, or we make it more awful—depending on our inclination.

There are many more—it is a very long book—but this last one in particular speaks very directly to Irving’s process. As noted up top, he returns to familiar themes and situations. In interviews he says that he begins with the same life experiences, but then changes where they go, how they morph, as if his creative process was to take the stem cells of his experiences and direct them to grow into a wide range of possible pieces. Same source, different outcomes.

It is not just the characters and situation that have morphed, it is the form as well. As Adam is a screenwriter as well as a novelist, and as this story is Adam’s, it is fitting that how he perceives the world makes its way into how he presents his story. There are long chapters that are written in screenplay format, complete with fade-ins, fade-outs, off-screen narration, closeups, wide-shots, the whole toolkit. It is an interesting tactic. I found it off-putting, but it does allow for a different approach to the material.

He does not just talk about writing per se, but incorporates into the novel considerable attention to his favorite book of all time, Moby Dick. (he has the last line of Moby Dick tattooed on his left forearm) This book opens with My mother named me Adam…, which resonates with Call me Ishmael and no less with …I am born from David Copperfield, Dickens being a particular Irving favorite. He sees himself as more of a 19th century novelist than a 21st century one.

…because those novels have always represented the model of the form for me. I loathed Hemingway. I thought Faulkner was excessive. Fitzgerald was ok, but lazy at times. I was enamored of the kind of novel all of my classmates at school despised.

References to Melville’s masterpiece (sometimes hilariously), Dickens, Ibsen, and plenty of others abound.

It is pretty clear that John Irving has had an interesting life. Eighty years old at the time of publication, he does not see The Last Chairlift as his last hurrah. In fact, he signed a three-book deal with Simon and Schuster, of which this was merely the first. He promises, though, that the next two will be a lot shorter.

Until then, this one will certainly suffice. Irving has lost none of his sense of humor. This book was more than occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. He has lost none of his feel for writing relatable humans. While some of the supporting cast are painted in broad strokes, to illustrate this or that sociopolitical issue of a given time, the main ones, and even hordes of second-tier characters are drawn with fine lines, and deep sensitivity. He has lost none of his vision, seeing clearly the currents of the eras considered, and how those have impacted social and political possibility for rounded humans who do not fit the square holes of a boilerplate majority. For all that Irving writes about people who are different, he makes it eminently clear that in matters that count we all share the same needs, to be loved, seen, and respected for who we are. Here’s hoping it will not be another seven years until we get to enjoy another of John Irving’s marvelous works.

…the dead don’t entirely go away—not if you see them on the subway, or in your heart.

Review posted – February 17, 2023

Publication date – October 18, 2022

I received an ARE of The Last Chairlift from Simon & Schuster in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Irving’s personal and FB pages

Interviews
—–CBS Sunday Morning – John Irving: A Writer’s Life with Rita Braver – a delight – Sees himself as a 19th century writer
—–Late Night with Seth Meyers – John Irving Doesn’t Write a Book Until He Knows How It’s Going to End
—–Freethought Matters – Freethought Matters: John Irving
– video – 28:08 – with Ann Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker – Interview begins at 2:57 – focus on chairlift begins at about 18:00
—–NPR Podcasts – Book of the Day – ‘The Last Chairlift’ is John Irving’s latest novel on sexual politics with Scott Simon – Audio – 10:26
—–Hazlift – ‘Hope is an Elusive Quality’: An Interview with John Irving by Haley Cunningham
—–Toronto Star – Hugging us back in the dark: John Irving on making us care about his characters, sexual politics, and the ghosts in his new book ‘The Last Chairlift’ by Deborah Dundas

Items of Interest from the author
—–Here Come the Ghosts Again on ghosts in his novels
—–CBS News – excerpt
—–Lithub – excerpt

My review of another book by Irving
—–In One Person

Items of Interest
—– Moby Dick – Full text – with annotations
—–David Copperfield – Full text – with footnote annotations

Items of Interest from the author
—– Here Come the Ghosts Againon ghosts in his novels

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Filed under Feminism, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Reviews

Tagged as books-of-the-year-2022, coming-of-age, feminist, Fiction, gay-and-lesbian, ghost, historical-fiction, lgbtq, literary-fiction

February 10, 2023 · 12:01 pm

All Hallows by Christopher Golden

book cover

…the static seemed to claw at the music, tear it up. Another voice broke in, like the ghost of one radio station overlapping with Kiss 108. But this wasn’t the voice of Sunny Joe White. The voice sounded like someone amused, caught in the middle of telling a joke, but then it changed, as if the man had something caught in his throat. The sound was awful, almost hateful, like an animal . . . and then it was just static again. Barb twisted the dial, trying to tune back in to Kiss, but all that came out was static and squealing, so she jabbed the power knob and the inside of the car went silent.

Nothing in these woods could be more dreadful, more terrifying, than the selfish cruelty of ordinary people.

Coventry, MA may be an appealing looking place, and there are some good things happening there, involving some good people, but below the mask of 1984 suburban bliss there lie some darker realities. And over the course of a single Halloween night there will be a cornucopia of revelation. (A Masque of the Orange Death?) As in Poe’s story, there is no refuge from what is coming, and there will be a hefty body count.

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Christopher Golden – image from eggplante.com

Tony Barbosa is a decent guy. Not hugely successful in the world. Just found a job after a long spell out of work. About to sell the family house, the damage from that prolonged unemployment. He puts on a Halloween tradition on his property every year, The Haunted Woods, with all the things one might expect. Sadly, this will be his last time. Daughter, Chloe, 17, loves helping out. His wife, Alice, puts up with it, and his son, Rick, 13, is simply uninterested. He will hang with his friend, Billie, a rare black girl in this area. Tony and Alice are just emerging from a rough patch. The future of their marriage is shaky. On this Halloween night, there will be a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.

Attorney Donnie Sweeney is a drunken, philandering pathetic excuse of a husband, reliably unreliable, a chronic liar. His wife, Barb, is reaching her limit with him. (Everyone loved Donnie Sweeney, but nobody more than Donnie himself, and for the first time, Charlie wondered if that wasn’t his dad’s defining characteristic. He loved his wife and his kids right up to the moment it threatened his ability to have a good time.) Their kids are a surprisingly decent lot, 18yo Julia, 13yo Brian, and Charlie, 11. Really, dude, you cannot simply put your scattered crap back in the garage and shut the garage door, on a weekend, but take off to do whatever, sticking your kids with the task?

In addition to these two families we follow Vanessa Montez, 17, and her bff, Steve Koenig, 16 Both are crushing on the same girl.

Trick-or-treaters are making the rounds, but there are some unfamiliar faces among the crowd tonight. A young-looking (nine, maybe) girl in a rough, old-time Raggedy Ann outfit. A teenaged scarecrow, his costume also seeming to be from another era, and a very pale boy named Leonard. Definitely not a trick-or-treater is the man they say they are fleeing, Mr. Cunning. They beg the local kids to stay with them, to protect them, until midnight, when the coast should be clear. Um, ok, sure, whatever. It is clear, though, that there is something strange in the neighborhood. A giant blackthorn tree appears, and a new (popup?) clearing in the woods. There is hunting going on.

There are two levels to this one, the presenting horror, which is pretty bloody horrifying, and the underlying horrors, also pretty bloody horrifying, but in a different way. In a 2014 interview with Nightmare Magazine, Golden said, I’m not just fascinated with monsters, but with monstrosity, both human and—in the way it reflects back the human—supernatural. There is a considerable volume of monstrosity in Coventry, hidden, or at least not publicly professed by the residents. A relatively-recently-arrived couple are suspected of dark doings. Are those suspicions accurate or just speculative hyperbole? Donnie’s low character is not exactly a state secret, but his charming mask will not hide him tonight. Bigotries will be exposed. But there is mask-dropping that will be benign, as some folks allow their true selves be seen, to positive effect.

The strength of the novel for me was its portrayal of middle-class duress. Tony Barbosa’s situation wandered queasily close to home. Everybody seems on the cusp of change. Troubled marriages abound. The adult women are given prime roles, their life goals, and marital experiences portrayed evenly with their mates’. Ditto the interactions among the teens and kids, wrestling with changes in their lives, moving from kid to adolescent, from adolescent to something more, discovering and molding who they are or want to be. The strength of Golden’s kid portrayals reminded me very much of Stephen King. There is an element of nostalgia for the 1980s here, but a much larger perspective on a place and time that is portrayed as far from appealing.

There were some aspects that I thought did not work quite so well. While it was possible to follow the many characters tracked here, there seemed rather a lot of them for a book of modest length. Chapters are short and offer alternating viewpoints. There are sixty two chapters in a book of three-hundred-thirty-six pages, so if you are inclined, you can read this one in small bits. Four characters get the most ink. Barb Sweeney gets ten chapters, Tony Barbosa and Vanessa get nine each, and Rick Barbosa gets eight. One character gets four chapters, two get three chapters, one gets two and five other characters get one chapter apiece. The character voices are distinct and Golden goes into sufficient depth with the majors to gain our interest.

Also, I found the layering of the supernatural evil excessive. And the back-and-forth struggle of one character to gain control inside a terrible space just seemed, even within the confines of a fantasy, a bit much. The gruesomeness worked well, offering shocking turns and some surprise demises.

There is persistent creepiness, ramping up from shadows, noises, and fleeting images to more direct darkness and considerable bloodshed.

By the end of the night, many truths will be revealed, facades of all sorts will be ripped off or tossed aside, many lives will have ended and many others will have been permanently changed. The line between a good scare and good, people-centered storytelling has never been thinner. All Hallows is a scary good read.

Something moved in the forest. A deeper shadow, back in among the trees. Vanessa narrowed her eyes, trying to focus, but someone said something funny and everyone laughed and she pretended to have heard the joke and laughed along with them, and the moment passed.
Still, something in the air had changed. The night seemed darker, as if the moonlight sifting through the branches had dimmed. The shadows had turned weird, the clearing a bit smaller, closer. This time when her skin prickled, it wasn’t from the flush that Julia made her feel, but from the way the night seemed to hold its breath.

Review posted – 02/10/23

Publication date – 01/24/23

I received a digital ARE of All Hallows from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review, and the offering of a few Druid prayers. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads

A three-and-a-half, really, but I rounded up.

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages

Golden is a monster of an author who got started, and found success, very early. He has a gazillion publications to his credit and an army-size host of teleplay credits from his years writing for Buffy with Joss Whedon, and plenty more. And then there are the comics. You may have heard of Hell Boy, among those. Here is a list of what he has published, from Fiction DB. I personally think he has elves, or more likely, goblins, chained to computers in his basement helping him crank out such volume.

My review of his prior book, Road of Bones

Interviews
—–Interview: Christopher Golden by Lisa Morton – January 2014
—–Atomic Geekdom – Book Review Interview / All Hallows by Christopher Golden – with Jenny Robinson-Nagy – video – 51:20

Items of Interest
—–Folk Customs – Tree Lore – Blackthorn
—–Britannica – Halloween
—–Britannica – Hallowe’en – a 1926 entry on this
—–Wiki on Samhain, the ritual from which Halloween was derived

Songs/Music
—–Air Supply – The Ones That You Love – chapter 3
—–Michael Jackson – Thriller – chapter 6
—–Bobby Picket and the Cryptkicker Five – The Monster Mash – chapter 6

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Filed under Fiction, Horror, Thriller, Thriller

Tagged as Fiction, Halloween, horror, Thriller

February 3, 2023 · 12:01 am

The Hunter by Jennifer Herrera

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Maude’s voice was far away, the way the chime of a bell can feel distant even if it’s right in front of you. “You’re too late,” she said to me, to no one. “Every last one of them is dead.”

“Every gift comes at a price.”

NYPD detective Leigh O’Donnell is on double-secret suspension. Her prospects of returning to her job are about as real as Dean Wormer ever authorizing the return of Delta Tau Chi. On top of that, she is newly separated from her (boss) husband, the person who suspended her. He could not understand why she would pull her gun on a fellow officer, allowing a caught suspect to escape. Thankfully, her brother, Ronan (Ro), gets in touch. Seems that back home in Copper Falls, Ohio, there had been a very suspicious triple death. And they would love it if an actual NYC detective could pop by for a look-see. Leigh takes the opportunity to skip town for a while, bringing along her four-year-old daughter, Simone.

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Jennifer Herrera – image from her site

Who says you can’t go home again? Oh, Thomas Wolfe, in his novel of that name. Ok. Fine, whatever. Well, Leigh gives it a go anyway, taking the opportunity to introduce Simone to Leigh’s uncles, to Ro, and to the town in which she had grown up. It will come as no shock that author Jennifer Herrera spent much of her childhood in a small Ohio town.

For the first five years of my life, I lived in a trailer park, which, while not economically diverse, was diverse in just about every other way. So when my family moved to a small town in rural Ohio, I wasn’t prepared for how alien I would feel there. Everyone was related. They all looked alike. They went to the same church. They held the same beliefs. If you’re not from there, it’s unbelievable. But those places still exist.

When I was a kid, all I knew was that I didn’t fit in and wanted to get out. When I got older, I started to wonder what it was about this community that made them so afraid of letting the outside world in. – from The Book Club Kit

Herrera comes up with a few possibilities about that, most of them less than complimentary to the residents of her fictionalized version. This is a place with secrets. Pretty tough to make any progress finding out the truth when you are struggling upstream against a torrent of lies.

The first-person story-telling is mostly linear with some flashbacks. Added to the presenting mystery of what happened to these three young men are Leigh’s personal struggles. She wants to save her endangered marriage. She wants to resurrect her career as a detective. But she also wants to get a better handle on who she really is. For better or worse, this Podunk town is a part of her, even if she had left it years before, intending never to return. She has loving family here, in addition to painful memories. This was once a true home for her. Could it ever be that for her again? It would be great for her daughter to have a larger family tree than the few branches Leigh can offer her in NY. So, Leigh is engaging in a journey of self-discovery. But it is also a quest. You can tick off the Campbellian stages, as our hero does battle with dark forces and descends to the equivalent of hell, fending off monsters in order to reach her goal. One of her uncles even thinks of her as a classic Irish hero of legend, Fionn MacCumhaill – aka Finn McCool. The uncles serve multiple roles, connection to and intel on locals, child care for Simone, a warm, familial homey element, and comic relief.

Imagery abounds. Herrera clearly enjoys playing with archetypal images. Snakes put in appearances. There is an apple orchard that, when paired with the snakes, certainly gives one an image of a corrupted Eden. A house tucked away out of sight makes one wonder if there might be someone inside preparing to cook children. A flock of birds massing to protect one damaged member has got to mean something, right?

Shrines figure large. There are said to be shrines in the caves under the waterfall, likely remnants of indigenous people who were driven out by colonizers. The people of the town seriously want to keep their town the way it is, preserved in amber, a sort of shrine to their past, to themselves. Herrera includes a fun reference to a relevant Twilight Zone episode to bolster the image. The title of the book comes in for some use. Early on a character refers to detective Leigh as a hunter. An archetypal native personage figures large. There is even a sly reference to hunter green.

There are peculiarities that grab our attention and demand exploration. For example, threes abound here. Maud had three brothers who perished together a lifetime ago. There were the multiple deaths seven years back of three young men of eighteen. The latest mortal hat trick included men in their twenties, contemporaries of the prior three. Interestingly, the last two trifectas all turned up in the pool at the bottom of the same waterfall. Curious, no? And Leigh’s mother had three brothers, the uncles of this tale. What’s up with all the treys?

Obviously, poking through all this imagery stuff, looking for connections that may or may not be real, digging down into rabbit holes as they appear (What is that rabbit late for, and where is he going?) is great fun. But, pleasurable as that is, the book would not succeed if we did not feel a connection to the lead. Not to worry. Leigh has her issues, but she is definitely relatable.

On the down side, I found it a bit tough to accept that Leigh would do what she did in NYC for the reason that is offered.

The supporting cast is a mixed crew. Some stand out, like the elderly, mysterious Maud. Onetime bf and now reporter, Mason Vogel, is a confusing foil for Leigh. Her brother, Ronan, is a likeable partner. The uncles are fun. Most stand back, as supporting characters do. Means to an end, whether advancing the plot or offering atmospherics. The notion of history, both the immediate and personal history of individuals, and the larger, longer cultural history of a place, and its hold on the present, for good or ill, is palpable. The procedural elements are well done, and the explanations make a dark sort of sense. The lead is someone we can pull for. The Hunter is a fun read, an engaging mystery that will keep you well-entertained, and keep your gray cells firing for the duration.

…most of the businesses in town—the grocery store, the antiques market, the candy shop—they’re all owned by the same seven families. The Wagners are the majority share, sure, but this town? It’s all one big family business.”
“That’s insane.”
“Not really. I’m sure it’s like that in a lot of places. See, those seven families have never left. Some individuals left, sure, but most of them stayed. People give their houses to their kids or their grandkids. Sometimes nephews and nieces. But it’s rare for them to sell to outsiders. Especially the houses close to the center of town. There are ordinances forbidding new construction. We don’t get many new people here.”

Review posted – 2/3/23

Publication date – 1/10/23

I received an eARE of The Hunter from Putnam in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, and Twitter pages

Interviews
—–Oh! Murder – Interview: Jennifer Herrera, The Hunter
—–The Mystery of Writing – The Hunter: Debut Thriller

Items of Interest from the author
—–Book Club Kit
—–Crimereads – MEN ARE THE MOST LIKELY VICTIMS OF HOMICIDE. WHY DO CRIME WRITERS KILL SO MANY WOMEN?

Items of Interest
—–Wiki on Thomas Wolfe’s novel, You Can’t Go Home Again

“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

—–Discovering Ireland – Fionn MacCumhaill – aka Finn McCool of Irish legends
—–Twilight Zone Fandom – The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine
—–ProWritingAid – Deep Dive: Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey”
—–Wiki on Animal House

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Tagged as crime, Fiction, procedural, Suspense, Thriller

January 27, 2023 · 12:01 am

The House in the Pines by Ana Reyes

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An ancient poplar loomed at the entrance to the abandoned road, its rounded mass of huddled gray limbs reminding her of a brain. She passed beneath its lobes, twigs branching like arteries overhead as she entered the forest.

Deep in these woods, there is a house that’s easy to miss.
Most people, in fact, would take one look and insist it’s not there. And they wouldn’t be wrong, not completely. What they would see are a house’s remains, a crumbling foundation crawling with weeds. A house long since abandoned. But look closely at the ground here, at this concrete scarred by sun and ice. This is where the fireplace goes. If you look deeply enough, a spark will ignite. And if you blow on it, that spark will bloom into a blaze, a warm light in this cold dark forest.

Maya Edwards is 25, not well off, ½ Guatemalan, ¼ Irish, ¼ Italian, with no career drive after getting her degree from Boston University. She is from Pittsfield, MA, where her mother still lives. Her father died before she was born. Not the only significant death in her life. When she was 18, her bff, Aubrey, died a mysterious death, at the hands, she believes, of a man they had both dated. But, despite her being present when it happened, there are no viable clues with which to make a case, and folks thought her nuts for even trying. Today Maya has a life, just moved in with her boyfriend, is about to meet his parents, when she sees a video on Youtube. A young woman, in a diner with her bf, suddenly keels over dead. A close look at her table partner reveals the same man who had killed her friend. She is terrified that he might continue to kill women and may become back to Pittsfield to clean up loose ends.

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Ana Reyes – image from her site

Maya keeps having dreams about a cabin in the woods, a welcoming abode, with a warm blaze in the fireplace, the burning pine logs adding their scent to the room, the log walls offering shelter from a strong wind. It is cozy, feels like home. But there is danger there as well. Frank is there in the dreams, always there. She struggles to understand the sounds she hears, but realizes they are coming from Frank, who appears suddenly behind her, and she wakes, drenched in sweat. So, what’s up with that?

The central mystery (well, there are two, the first one is whether Frank actually killed those two women, and if so how, and) what is the deal with the strange house in the woods that haunts her dreams, the House in the Pines of the title.

Maya is not the most reliable of narrators. She is going through withdrawal from Klonopin. It was prescribed to help her sleep, but the scrip can no longer be filled and she is trying to go cold turkey. She has used alcohol liberally to help her both sleep and drown out the darkness that troubles her. Is she imagining things? Are the drugs and alcohol causing her to hallucinate? Is the stress of white-knuckle withdrawal impairing her ability to reason?

I was living in Louisiana, working toward my MFA in fiction, and, like Maya,…had suddenly quit Klonopin after several years of taking it nightly for sleep. The doctor who had prescribed it back in LA never said anything about addiction, while my new Baton Rouge doctor treated me like an addict when I asked her for it. She cut me off cold turkey, and I went through protracted withdrawal syndrome, the symptoms of which inform Maya’s experience in the book. Writing about benzodiazepine withdrawal—albeit from her perspective—helped me through it. – from the Book Club Kit

The story flips back and forth between the present day and seven years prior. We get to see her friendship with Aubrey, and how Frank had come between them. We see how her current troubles with withdrawal and her determination to look into the Frank situation may be interfering with her current serious relationship.

Maya does her Miss Marple thing to try to find out what really happened to Aubrey, to find out how Frank killed her, and one more thing. During the few weeks in which she dated Frank, there were multiple episodes in which she lost hours of time. Did Frank drug her? There is peril aplenty, as we take Maya’s word that Frank is a killer, so all her activity might be putting her in mortal peril. If only the cops had taken her seriously, but you know the cops in such almost stories never do.

Pliny the Elder said Home is where the heart is, but how can a place that feels so home-like also be so terrifying? This reflects some events and concerns in Reyes’s life.

The inspiration was mostly subconscious. I was living alone in a new city, cut off from any place I’d call home, when I wrote the first draft. This lonely feeling inspired one of the book’s major themes, which is the universal yearning to return to a place and time of belonging. That theme shaped the story and helped me build the titular house in the pines. – from the Book Club Kit

Reyes incorporated several elements of her life into the book. In addition to struggles with addiction, both Maya and Ana are half Guatemalan. Both were raised in Pittsfield, MA. The book took seven years to write, and the gap between Aubrey’s death and Maya’s return to the scene of the crime is seven years.

In order to solve the mysteries, Maya must figure out the imagery in an incomplete book her father had been writing when he died in Guatemala. The references take one a bit afield, but if you dig into them, you will be rewarded. I posted some info in EXTRA STUFF.

Maya’s father’s book points to an important truth about the danger she’s in. For me this was a metaphor for inherited trauma. Like so many people with roots in colonized places, the violence of the past has a way of showing up in the present in unexpected and highly personal ways. This is true for Maya in a very literal sense. To save herself, she must understand a story written before she was born. – from the Book Club Kit

There are some fairy-tale-like references in here, but I am not sure they are much more than added in passing. One can see certainly see Frank as a seductive wolf, a la Little Red Riding Hood. A musical group dresses as the fairy godmothers, lending one to consider Sleeping Beauty, which is further reinforced by Maya’s several episodes of lost time, and, ironically, her difficulties with sleep. Woods, per se, have always been a source of fear in Western lore.

So, is it any good? Yep. Ana is certainly flawed enough for us to gain some sympathy, although she cashes in some of those chits with occasional foolish decisions. Secondary characters are a mixed lot. Her boyfriend is thinly drawn. Mom has more to her. Her teen bud, Aubrey, even more. Frank is an interesting mix of loser and menace. The strongest bits for me were a visit to Guatemala and the depiction of the attractiveness of the house. I will not give away the explanation for it all, but, while it may have a basis in the real world, I found it a stretch to buy completely. Still, righteous, if damaged, seeker of truth digging into the mysterious, while imperiled by a dark force, with little support from anyone, with a fascinating bit of other-worldliness at its core. I enjoyed my stay in the cabin. Page-turner material.

The image is both comforting and really sinister at the same time once we learn more about it.
Exactly. That’s definitely what I was going for, that dark side of nostalgia. – from the Salon interview

Review posted – 01/27/23

Publication date – 01/03/23

I received an ARE of The House in the Pines from Dutton in return for a fair review, and another log on the fire. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages

The House in the Woods Was a Reese’s book club selection for January 2023

Interviews
—–NY Times – Teaching Writing to Retirees Helped Ana Reyes Stay Focused by Elisabeth Egan
—–Salon – “House in the Pines” thriller author on the “dark side of nostalgia” with a narrator no one believes
—–Writer’s Digest – Ana Reyes: On Working The Writing Muscles by Robert Lee Brewer
—–Professional Book Nerds – Talking The House in the Pines with Author Ana Reyes by Joe Skelley – audio – 40:00

Items of Interest
—–Book Club Kit
—–Gnosis.org – The Hymn of the Pearl – The Acts of Thomas

Songs/Music
—– Emily Portman – Two Sisters – referenced in Chapter 5, although by a different performer
—–Bobby Darin – Dream Lover – playing at the Blue Moon Diner in Chapter 10
—–Mano Negra – El Senor Matanza – noted in Chapter 11 as Maya’s new favorite band
—– Nine Inch Nails – The Downward Spiral – mentioned in Chapter 17
—– The Foo Fighters – There is Nothing Left to Lose – mentioned in Chapter 17
—–Lenny Kravitz – Mama Said – mentioned in Chapter 17

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Filed under Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

Tagged as crime, Fiction, Mystery, read, Suspense, Thriller

December 16, 2022 · 12:01 am

The Night Ship by Jess Kidd

book cover

“Come.” John Pinten turns and puts his palm against the hull. “Do as I do.”
Mayken crawls forward and puts her palm next to his, flat against the planks. She sees how much smaller and cleaner her hand is. Too clean for a cabin boy. But John Pinten doesn’t seem to notice.
“She’s all that lies between us and the deep dark fathoms of the sea.” John Pinten’s voice grows quiet, grave. “Can you feel the ocean pulling at the nail heads, pressing against the planks, prizing the caulking? The water wants in.”

Old superstitions are rife now. The sailors lead the way. Words must be chanted over knots. Messmates must be served in a particular order. A change of wind direction must be greeted. Portents are looked for and translated. The cut of the wake noted. The shape of clouds debated…A lamp taken down into the hold will now burn green. Monstrous births plague the onboard animals. Their issue is hastily thrown overboard to prevent alarm. Eyeless lambs. Mouthless piglets. A litter of rabbits joined together, a mass of heads and limbs. The gardener harvests fork-tailed carrots from his boxed plot outside the hen coop.
“It’s the way of long journeys,” says Creesje. “They alter what people think and see.”

1628 – Mayken van der Heuvel heads out on a long, exciting, but very dangerous adventure. She is setting sail on the grandest ship of the era, the Batavia, to a place by the same name, the capital of the Dutch East Indies. Well, in 1628, anyway. Today, we know it as Jakarta, Indonesia. Her journey is not being undertaken by choice, though. Mayken’s mother died giving birth to a child not her husband’s. The girl is being sent to her father, accompanied by a nursemaid, the kindly, but very superstitious, Imke. Mayken is nine years old.

There are many layers to this child: undergarments, middle garments, and top garments. Mayken is made of pale skin and small white teeth and fine fair hair and linen and lace and wool and leather. There are treasures sewn into the seams of her clothing, small and valuable, like her.
Mayken has a father she’s never met. Her father is a merchant who lives in a distant land where the midday sun is fierce enough to melt a Dutch child.

We follow Mayken’s adventures on this months-long journey across the world. But we know from the beginning that the ship will not complete its trip.

1989 – A nine-year-old boy has just endured a journey of his own.

Gil is made of pale skin and red hair and thrifted clothes. His shoes, worn down on the outsides, lend an awkward camber to his walk. Old ladies like him, they think he’s old-fashioned. Truck drivers like him because he takes an interest in their rigs. Everyone else finds him weird.

He never knew his father, and Mom kept them on the move all of his brief life, until her death. Gil has been sent to live with his crusty fisherman grandfather, Joss. To the place off the west coast of Australia where the off-course Batavia met its inglorious end. Researchers have been retrieving bits of the ship and its contents. The island is said to be haunted by the spirit of a young girl, Little May.

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Jess Kidd – image from The Bookseller – by Cordula Tremi

Kidd learned about the Batavia while casting about for a subject for her next novel. I will leave you to explore the real-life story here in Wikipedia and in the Sea Museum site.

Mayken and Gil’s stories are told in alternating chapters. The duration of their experiences, however, is not the same. Mayken’s time on the Batavia is considerably longer than Gil’s, on what is now Beacon Island. Kidd handles this disparity well, so that difference is not obvious.

Mayken is a particularly curious and adventurous little girl, exploring and experiencing the ship with a range of partners, despite her caretakers preferring for her to be a demure, proper young lady. She has a talent for gaining trust and affection from those around her, both children and adults. It comes in handy. Being a child, she carries some odd notions with her, and is susceptible to things that challenge credulity. She is convinced that there is a mythical beast in the deep hold of the ship. (The eel creature was an ancient monster and foe of all humankind. Its name was Bullebak.) Is the evidence she spies of its existence sharp perception or childish imagination? Being the child of a wealthy household, she gains a lot more latitude from those in charge than a street urchin might, which allows her to get away with slipping away from the “Above World” of the deck and passengers to the “Below World” where the crew lives and works.

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The Batavia replica was constructed between 1985 and 1995 at the Bataviawerf (Batavia shipyard) in Lelystad, The Netherlands. Image: Malis via Wiki Commons – image and text from Sea Museum

Gil is a lonely boy, who has seen little stability in his life, and more than his share of horror. Grandpa Joss is less than welcoming, (Gil’s mother had not exactly been a model daughter.) wants him to become a fisherman like him, an occupation to which Gil is ill-suited and strongly opposed. He finds a friend or two. Silvia, the young wife of an older fisherman (and hated rival to his grandfather) takes him under her wing. Dutch, an older deckhand, takes an interest in him as well. In addition, Gil acquires a companion of a different sort, Enkidu, a tortoise named for a bff from ancient literature.

There are challenges to survival for both Mayken and Gil, not just their initial de-parenting trauma and grief. In fact there is enough mirroring of their experiences for a carnival fun house. Both are, effectively, orphaned only children, with dead mothers and absent fathers, sent to live with relations after the death of their mothers. Both explore strange new places, with the assistance of those more familiar. Both have a belief in the reality of supposedly mythical beings, finding it easier to seek explanations for the world in cultural fantasies than in the awfulness of the humans around them. (The shadow-monster darkens and becomes solid. It is terrible. Slime slicks and drips over ancient barnacled scales. Eyes, luminous and bulging. Gills rattling venomously. A great, festering eel-king.) It is called a Bunyip.

Both are outsiders, in peril from people in their community. There is plenty more. But both come into possession of a stone with a hole in it, that is supposed to have special properties, a witch-stone, or hag-stone. The very same one. It is a link across three hundred sixty years, connecting their parallel experiences. As children, neither has control over much of anything, so they are both at the mercy of the adults around them, not all of whom are benign. With limited immediate familial resources, they are trying to create a kind of family for themselves.
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This engraving depicts three scenes associated with the loss of the Dutch ship Batavia in 1629. Top: Batavia approaches the Houtman Abrolhos Islands off Western Australia at night. Lower right: the vessel aground on a reef with the crew in boats attempting to refloat it. Lower left: the state of the Batavia the next day, and the passengers and crew abandoning the ship. ANMM Collection 00004993

One of the wonderful things about this novel is the view we get of a lengthy ocean voyage in the 17th century.

The physical research helped. “Bumping my head about 400 times as I walked around the ‘Batavia’ replica, it really helped to get a physical sense of the life. The same with the island, walking around and seeing the barrenness and feeling the elements.” – from The Bookseller interview

The demise of the ship is terrifying, but not so much as the demise of civilization that follows for the survivors. Existential threats abound in 1989 as well, for Gil and others.

There are many compelling secondary characters. Several on the ship stand out, a soldier, John Pinten, the ship’s doctor, Aris Jansz, Holdfast, a denizen of the rigging, who snatches Mayken up. Imke the nursemaid is a fun addition, and Creesje, who looks to help Mayken going forward, is a warm, nurturing presence. Those surrounding Gil are likewise interesting. Gil’s colorful grandfather, Joss, goes through some changes. Dutch is a warm force, as is a researcher, on the island looking into the wreck.

While Mayken and Gil are entirely fictional, Kidd has populated her story with many of the actual people who were on the Batavia. The presence of those historical personages gives the events that take place in the novel even greater heft. The kids are very nicely drawn, and will engage your interest and sympathy.

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Wallabi Island (left), Beacon Island (centre) and Morning Reef (right). Image: Hesperian with NASA satellite photos via Wiki Commons. – image and text from Sea Museum

Tension ratchets up for both Mayken and Gil. While we know the fate of the Batavia, we do not know the fate of all those she carried.

Unlike in her previous book, Things in Jars, which dealt very considerably with things fantastical, the unreality of the creatures May and Gil perceive is much more subtle. The creatures both claim to be real may or may not be. But both creatures serve admirably as metaphors for the awfulness of humanity.

While this may not be the best possible choice for reading on a ship-based vacation, it is a moving and fascinating read for landlubbers. Kidd writes with the touch of the poet, adorning her compelling, moving story with sparkling descriptive finery, while offering us a child’s-eye view of the most remarkable ship of its time, and telling a tale of doom. Both Gil’s and Mayken’s stories are strong enough masts to have sailed alone, but together they make a weatherly craft and catch a strong wind, easily speeding past potential story-telling shoals.

“How do you describe dread, Gil? That’s what the bunyip is: an attempt to give fear a shape.”
Gil thinks on this.
“Everyone’s fear looks different,” Birgit continues. “So everyone’s creature looks different. But they all eat crayfish, women, and children. That seems to be universal.”
“They’re just warnings for kids. Not to play near water or talk to strangers.”

Review posted – December 16, 2022

Publication date – October 18, 2022

I received an ARE of The Night Ship from Atria in return for a fair review, and a small, ancient piece of (maybe) bone, recently dug up in our back yard. Thanks, folks.

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Kidd’s personal, Twitter, Goodreads, Instagram and FB pages

Interviews
—–The Bookseller – Jess Kidd discusses her latest novel, new perspectives and maritime disasters by Alice O’Keefe
—–BNBook Club Jess Kidd discusses SCATTERED SHOWERS with Miwa Messer and Shannon DeVito – video – 41:28 – forget the title – they talk about The Night Ship

My review of an earlier book by the author
—–Things in Jars

Items of Interest
—–Wiki on The Batavia
—–Sea Museum – The Batavia
—–Wiki on Beacon Island
—–The Wayback Machine – Batavia’s Graveyard
—–Western Australian Museum – Batavia’s History
—–Dutch Folklore Wikia – Bullebak
—–American Museum of Natural History – The Bunyip
—–Wiki on Bunyip

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Filed under Fantasy, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

Tagged as fantasy, Fiction, historical-fiction, literary-fiction, magical-realism

November 25, 2022 · 12:01 am

The Witch and the Tsar by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore

book cover

Once war is on men’s minds, Selica had said, it festers within, claiming them.

For a soldier to let his enemy live despite the entrenched inclination to kill touched my heart with a flame. And as he looked out on our land, on the people dying and bleeding on it, no matter if they were Russian or Mongol, I saw pain, deep and endless and raw, open inside him like a ravine about to swallow us. There was light there, light that left me hopeful. Perhaps life, possibly even goodness, did exist, even in a soldier, and it prevailed in the world after all.

Baba Yaga, aka Bony Legs, has gotten a bad rap. Ivan the Terrible, however, deserves all the lousy press that can be heaped upon him. Terrible seems far too tame a word, The monstrous, the psycho-killer, the unspeakable, the mindless slayer of mankind, and on, and on, [insert your pejorative here]. (Of course, this is the portrait presented in the book. The real-life Ivan may have had cause for his paranoia, given the considerable opposition of the gentry to many of his policies. Find out more in this small piece in Britannica.)

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Olesya Salnikova Gilmore – image from her site

The most common images of Yaga are of a frightening witch, tooling about in a strange vehicle, trapping and devouring children, and generally doing dirt to people, a personification of evil. But even in traditional lore, she is sometimes shown with a softer side, a healer instead of a tormenter, a consoler, a comforter instead of a horror. She has been seen as a personification of nature, a Slavic version of Persephone. She appears as a change agent in many stories, a trickster, helping the hero or heroine fulfill their quest.

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Image from The House of Twigs

I had written two books that had gone nowhere. Totally uninspired, almost desperate, I turned to the Russian folktales I had grown up with as a child. Baba Yaga loomed large in these stories—her elusive and mercurial character, her enchanting chicken-legged hut, her terrific mortar and pestle mode of transport, her sharp tongue and fearsome appearance, unsurprising for a woman of knowledge living alone in the wood.
As it turns out, some scholars believe the Baba Yaga we know—the old, ugly hag from the fairy tales—is based on, or is a descendent of, a fertility and earth goddess worshiped by ancient pagan Slavs. I was instantly fascinated by how a goddess could become a witch and just knew I had to write a book not about the infamous hag, but about the little-known woman named Yaga.
– from the Writer’s Digest interview

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A painting portraying Baba Yaga. According to Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga was a witch who often preys on children to eat them. However, some accounts present her as a wise and helpful creature. The painting was created in 1917 and is now located at the House Museum of Viktor Vasnetsov in Moscow.

Gilmore is looking to give Yaga some better press, make her more human in some ways, more of a bad-ass superhero in others. She has a team, of course. (Y-men?) The house on chicken legs that is the very definition of creepy, has been transformed into Little Hen, a supportive, nurturing friendly character who might have been the original mobile home. When Yaga speaks to Little Hen she regards her as somewhere between a beloved pet and a partner. Dyen (meaning day) is a considerable wolf. He (thankfully) is Yaga’s primary means of high speed transportation, while also offering his considerable fierceness. Noch (meaning night) is an owl. Noch specializes in reconnaissance and intel-gathering. They share Yaga’s immortality.

Xénia Hoffmeisterová [cs], Ježibaba [cs] (2000)

As a provider of potions for this and that, Yaga has a following. Among those is the tsar’s wife, the tsaritsa, whom she has known for a long time. She is suffering from an illness that the court physicians cannot seem to touch. Yaga helps her out, but suspects foul play. Although she would prefer to remain safely in her house in the woods, she must go to Moscow to find out who is doing this to Anastasia Romanovna, a kind, sweet young woman. It would appear that Yaga and crew are not the only immortals wandering about. The tsar has fallen under the influence of a dark-hearted ageless sort, someone Yaga knows. And the game is afoot.

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Image from King Edward’s Music

Tsar Ivan is not exactly the best administrator, and it is not long before he is laying waste to large swaths of the country, under the guidance of a dark force. Whether getting there because of his genetic inheritance, or because his mind had been poisoned by a demonic sort, (The actual Ivan was quite superstitious, taking an interest in witchcraft and the occult.) Ivan, who seems at least somewhat rational when we meet him, is soon barking mad, seeing enemies everywhere, even among friends, and showing no hesitation about slaughtering anyone who displeases him. Yaga loves her Mother Russia and considers it her patriotic duty to defend her against enemies foreign and domestic. Ivan definitely counts among the latter. So, superhero vs supervillain.

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Ivan Bilibin, Baba Yaga, illustration in 1911 from “The tale of the three tsar’s wonders and of Ivashka, the priest’s son” (A. S. Roslavlev)

There are levels of existence here with diverse characteristics, lands of the dead and living, a glass mountain, with spells aplenty. Yaga’s adventures might remind you of western mythology and Campbellian quest forms having to do with descending to hell in order to emerge better armed to take on whatever. Yaga needs help from other immortal sorts to accomplish her mission, which becomes pointedly clear later in the book. In the shorter term, she is faced with carnage in Russia, and trying to find ways to stop or even just slow it down.

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Baba Yaga depicted in Tales of the Russian People (published by V. A. Gatsuk in Moscow in 1894)

There is even a bit of romance to counterbalance some of the considerable blood-letting.

After I had witnessed my first birthing not ten years into my life, Mokosh had explained to me the intricacies of lovemaking and child making. “Though immortals can birth other gods and half gods,” she had said, gently, “it is not simple for us, with mortals above all. Most of the time, it happens not. It is even harder for half gods. If it happens, it does so for a reason. It is willed by the Universe.” I had known many men over the centuries, both mortal and immortal. Not once had my trysts ended in anything other than fleeting pleasure or pointless regret. I knew it would never happen for me.

But then she meets Vasily Alekseyevich Adashev, studly warrior, but mortal, which is a problem. It gets complicated. He is probably in his 20s or 30s, she is several hundred. (Baba Cougar?) It is a delightful element.

This is a time of transition in Russia, when the old gods were being replaced by the Christian invader. But local loyalties were sometimes with the old and sometimes with the new. Yet, the old gods were still actively interfering in human activities. Getting a look at such a tumultuous period in Russian history is one of the bonuses of this book.

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Image from Meet the Slavs

The view of reality Gilmore presents is informed by her childhood exposure to Russian mythology. She was born in Moscow and spent her early years there. Fairy tales from childhood figure large, particularly stories set in Old Russia. (Gilmore would have included even more, but maybe in some future work.) Setting her tale in medieval times felt right, which led to focusing on Ivan as THE medieval tsar. It helped that he made an ideal villain, given his location in history, his interest in the occult, and his apparently mass murderous sociopathy. What makes a guy go there?

This being a book by a Russian-born author, about Russia, you can expect that many characters will be referred to be multiple names. And it can be tricky discerning the good Ivans, Vasilies and Alexes from the bad ones. I read an ARE, so cannot say if the final print (and epub) versions contain character lists. If your copy lacks one, you might want to start your own. My minimal gripes about the book have to do with the attention required to keep everyone straight, and a need for a primer on the structure of everything in Old Russian lore. How many layers of afterlife are there? How does one move from to another? It can be eye-crossing keeping this in order.

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Image from Amino Apps

That said, I found The Witch and the Tsar a delightful, satisfying read. Yaga was a very appealing character. Gilmore has succeeded in making her relatable, and her companions appealing. The devastation wrought by Ivan and those driving him provide all the motive force anyone might require to do everything possible to stop it, which gives us a lot to root for. The romantic element is a nice touch. Added payload on Russian history, folklore, and old religion is most appreciated. I have provided a few links in EXTRA STUFF to more about Yaga in folklore. I urge you to check those out. Baba Yaga may have had plenty of unpleasant things written about her, and many a hideous image created, but in The Witch and the Tsar, Yaga is looking pretty good.

Mother had taught me the immortal side of earth magic, of doing without awareness, without feeling. With Dusha, I learned to listen to the natural world around me, not only to the sky, the trees, the waters, the very air, but also to myself.

Review posted – 11/25/22

Publication date – 9/20/22

I received an ARE of The Witch and the Tsar from Ace of Berkley of Penguin Random House in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the Gilmore’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages

Gilmore is hard at work on her next novel, with a draft due to her editor in September. This one will be a gothic, set in the 1920s, after the revolution. Two sisters confront their past in their old ancestral house in Moscow. Pub date TBD.

Interviews
—–Malaprop’s Bookstore & Cafe – The Book of Gothel: Mary McMyne in convo with Olesya Salnikova Gilmore – video – Gilmore reads from the beginning of her book – 0:00 to 21:48. Mary McMyne then reads from her book – to 39:43. Then Stephanie Jones-Byrne interviews them from about 40 minutes
—–Writer’s Digest – Olesya Salnikova Gilmore: On Introducing Russian History to Fantasy Readers by Robert Lee Brewer
—–Paulette Kennedy – DEBUT SPOTLIGHT: Olesya Salnikova Gilmore

Items of Interest from the author
—–Paste Magazine – excerpt
—–discussion guide from her site

Items of Interest
—–World History Encyclopedia – Baba Yaga
—–Literary Hub – Baba Yaga Will Answer Your Questions About Life, Love, and Belonging by Taisia Kitaiskaia
—–Britannica on Ivan the Terrible

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Tagged as fantasy, Fiction, historical-fiction, literary-fiction

October 14, 2022 · 12:01 am

Lungfish by Meghan Gilliss

book cover

…lungfish survive droughts by coating themselves in mud and sinking deep into sleep, the mud hardening and cracking in the sun until finally water returns and sets everything loose again, brings movement back to earth, and fish. Lungfish can go three and a half years without food.

…what’s new, now, is everything I didn’t see. My life behind the curtain.

Tuck is struggling to survive. She and her husband, Paul, along with daughter Agnes (two and a half), fled Pittsburgh after he lost his job and they got evicted. They head to an otherwise uninhabited island off the coast of Maine. It features a house that her grandmother owned, but gran has passed. And the house is to go to her son, Tuck’s father. Problem is that Pops cannot be located, nor can he be presumed dead, so Tuck is stuck. If her father were around to inherit, then Tuck and family would have a place to live. Thus, they are squatting in the house, dreading a determination by the executor of Gran’s estate that the place be sold. Winter is coming and she has to find someplace else to live before that happens.

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Meghan Gilliss – image from Skylark Bookshop

Problem #2 – hubby is a drug addict. It was why he’d lost his job and they were forced to move. He is trying to rehab on the island. And they are broke, having sold most of their possessions. So, Tuck is trying to survive on what little food remains in the house. Once Paul is well enough to work, he begins taking Gran’s boat to the mainland, and he does find something eventually. But then starts returning back to the island much later than expected, and with a paltry amount of money, and minimal provisions. So, the problem persists.

Tuck and Agnes forage for food in the woods and on the beach, barely managing to hold body and soul together. Tuck reads to Agnes. Her favorite is Rumpelstiltskin. They use the readable books that have been left in the house, religious texts, field guides, and poetry, William Blake gets some repeats, particularly The Tyger. There is a strange scent in the house that she associates with this poem and an actual tiger. There are field guides that help them in their foraging, and identification of local flora and fauna.

There are no phones, no internet connections, and a radio that is used sparingly with juice from a gas-powered generator. How does one cope with such aloneness? With only a small child for company most of the time? Many a new mother might ask the same question, particularly if their husband had made himself as absent as Paul has been.

Tuck has been mostly a passive sort, willing to accept whatever others, particularly Paul, might tell her. He is her provider and she is good with that, as long as, you know, he provides. It seems that he is better at providing for his addiction than he is at providing usable resources for his family. He tries going cold turkey, but it is a struggle, and the demons that have driven him toward addiction remain.

So, we have a very isolated (a total trope, on an island with no comms) woman having to face the fact that if she does not provide for herself and her daughter, no one else can be counted on to do so. This is her challenge and her path.

The book is written in fragments. Chapters (I counted 88, but could be off by one or two) are often only a page, or a part of a page long, comprised of small paragraphs. There is a lot of white space. But, while in terms of word count, it is probably not that much, it is a slow read. Gilliss has a very poetic style, which, while lovely to read, often calls for re-reading. Much of what we need to know is hinted at, but rarely overtly stated. It is a rewarding read, but requires real engagement. In a pointillist sort of way, Gilliss is offering us many, many dots, and asking us to step back and see the whole image she has created.

Several elements stand out. Smell features large. Tuck follows her nose to memories as well as contemporary revelations. The scents of her grandmother and father remain a presence, as does the unidentifiable aroma she names tiger.

I smelled my grandmother on the blankets in the mornings, after the night’s worth of body heat made a sort of steam collect in the wool; I smelled her on my skin. I smelled my father, too, when the tide was out and the mud squelched between our toes…I smelled my brother in the smooth-barked oak.

Hunger looms over all, a constant presence, made even more dire when she begins giving her paltry share of their food to Agnes. Yet Tuck is determined to say nothing, or as little as humanly possible, even as Paul returns home from work with little to offer them, having learned in a fraught childhood that it was safer to remain mute.

Seeing is key. By nature, I made do with what was given. By nature, I didn’t much notice what wasn’t. Tuck wonders how she had not seen his addiction earlier. But clearly Paul is not all that concerned, as focused as he is on trying to rehab, and then feeding his addiction. Abandoned by both parents, Tuck is now effectively being abandoned by her husband. But learning to see does not come naturally to her. I was late to so much knowledge.

Searching is another thread, which extends to the physical and spiritual worlds. It is crucial that she locate her father, so Tuck goes to the mainland library publicly accessible computers to search for him, and to search for a place to live, to search for her legal rights regarding the house, and to search for information about the drug Paul is addicted to. She is also searching for meaning. Tuck wonders whether it might help to attend church even though she is not an actual believer. Her grandmother was a Christian, but doesn’t faith require too much loss of personal identity to a collective mind? She also thinks about what is worth believing in, and what belief is. But she had been a believer in her husband, and now that faith has been shaken. She looks for meaning in the natural world of the island.

Gilliss writes beautifully about the nature her characters encounter, the creatures they see, and/or eat, the seaweed, mushrooms and other growing things that provide either calories or visual sustenance.

We have a piece of property like this in my family—a steadily shrinking piece of the land that generations of my ancestors have spent time on. – from The Millions interview

So, there is a lot going on here, a young mother coming to terms with the reality of her dire situation, contemplations of faith and meaning, using all the senses to paint a picture. It can be a bit tough to relate to Tuck at first. Really, honey? You did not see that your guy was doing drugs? How blind can a person be? Pretty blind, it turns out. But we can still relate to her struggle to save herself and her child, particularly once she starts to see more of the reality in front of her, once she becomes an active participant rather than a passive non-player. The writing is poetic and compelling, the fragmentary style interesting. It works to support a dream-like quality that meshes well with Tuck’s experience. Lungfish is a compelling first novel, beautiful and engaging, as rich with insight and beauty as it is heavy with dark circumstances and feckless behavior. It will be difficult to ever walk a beach again, picking up stones and examining the diversity of nature’s bounty without thinking of this book.

How could we be expected to save these things, one after another, when they couldn’t even do this basic thing for themselves?

Review posted – October 14, 2022

Publication date – September 13, 2022

I received a copy of Lungfish from Catapult in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks.

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Gilliss’ personal and Instagram pages

Profile – From Catapult
MEGHAN GILLISS attended the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a fellow of the Hewnoaks Artist Residency. She has worked as a journalist, a bookseller, a librarian, and a hospital worker, and lives in Portland, Maine. Lungfish is her first novel.

Interviews
—–Skylark Bookshop – Meghan Gilliss discusses LUNGFISH – by Alex George – video – 59:43
—–Ploughshares – Lungfish’s Exploration of Isolation by Kaitlyn Teer
—–Electric Literature – There’s No Place Like Grandma’s Abandoned Island by Arturo Vidich
—–The Millions – Peace Alongside Unrest: The Millions Interviews Meghan Gilliss by Liv Albright

Item of Interest from the author
—–Bomb – excerpt

Item of Interest
—–William Blake – The Tyger

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Filed under Fiction, Literary Fiction

Tagged as Fiction, Literary Fiction, Maine

September 23, 2022 · 12:01 am

My Dirty California by Jason Mosberg

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I love this state, I really do. Yet, at times, California feels like something hip someone in marketing tried to fit in a bottle to sell. California is the kind of place that can make a person who doesn’t care about flowers care about wildflowers. But there’s a dark history below California’s undeniably beautiful surface. A dark history with how its destiny manifested. Japanese internment. The LA riots. The California Alien Land Law of 1913. The Mexican-American War. Facebook. Sometimes I think California never left the gold rush era. Gold was merely substituted with other treasure to chase. Movies. Fame. Waves. Venture capital. Youth. Wine. Love. Spirituality. Technology. I guess I’m part of the everlasting, ever-changing rush.

When I first moved to LA, I realized no one here goes bowling. There’s too much to do. Marty Morrel did it all. He explored every inch of the city of LA, every crack and crevice of the state of California, and it’s all documented in hundreds of videos, thousands of pictures, and scores of essays and journal entries. Even if there hadn’t been any crimes, I think I would have wanted to make a podcast about Marty. But there were crimes. I thought murders would be the most disturbing part of this podcast, but that was before I learned about Pandora’s House. – from a fictional, unaired podcast

As you can see, My Dirty California opens with a fun, noir narration. The sensibility persists, although there is no troubled detective or PI asking uncomfortable questions, drinking too much, and getting beaten up. After that opening bit, Mosberg leaves the boundless beauty (the clean aspect?) of the state to other writers. This is today’s off-the-tourist-map California, violence, murder, drugs, trafficking, scams, surfer dudes, documentary film-making, outrageous, long-lasting parties, portraits of some Cali subcultures, a bit of mental illness, sleuthing, sex (only a little) and some serious other-worldly notions. There are LOLs to be had here, and even some tears. Jody, Pen, Tish and Renata are all searching for something, and Marty Morrel is at the center of it all.

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Jason Mosberg – from his site

Unfortunately for Marty he is not around, as he becomes late early on. After a ten-year hiatus he returned to his home near Lancaster, PA, where his father and brother, Jody, live. Soon after, a hooded gunman killed him, for reasons unknown, and his father, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But before his demise, he had clued Jody in to a project he had been working on

“I’ve been making this thing. I don’t really know what it is yet. It’s called My Dirty California.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s a website. But it’s really just a place I’ve been doing a . . . project. I didn’t even know what it was at first. I wasn’t trying to define it. Eventually it kinda became a video log, about my adventures or whatever. A place to store all the pictures I take. And I kept up with it. Posting these videos online.”
“So it’s a blog.”
“No,” Marty says…“It’s more a place I can store all these photos and videos and essays till I figure out what to do with the project. Maybe at some point I’ll edit them into a documentary or a piece of long-form web video art.”

When Jody decides to heads out to LA to find out what Marty was up to, what got him killed, that collection is his starting point, along with letters and postcards his brother had sent home. Jody is not the only person availing of Marty’s trove.

Penelope Rhodes is a documentary film maker. She’d had some success with an earlier film about a UFO, which gets her several meetings about her new project. The driving force of her life is finding her father, who vanished when she was a kid. However, this is a search with a difference. Pen has a rather peculiar idea of what may have happened to him, involving Matrix-like simulations. Don’t ask. She is fixated on finding a particular place, Pandora’s House, where she believes it might be possible to move from this simulation (the one we are all living in) to another, where her father might be. This obsession has made getting by in this simulation rather a challenge. In her explorations, she comes across Marty’s vast materials, and follows the clues wherever they lead, or wherever she imagines they might lead.

Typhony Carter is young, married, with one son. She works cleaning houses, but cannot get enough work to keep her family afloat. Her husband, Mike, is a dedicated father. But when they go to a rally about cops killing yet another black teen, Mike gets into it with a counter-protester and winds up in jail. Times get even tougher, so when a scheme appears, that involves finding a hoard of art, supposedly secreted away by a recently deceased collector/dealer, she takes on the mission.

Renata, 19, travels from Mexico to the USA hoping for a better life, not, of course, through the legal channels. There is a contact in LA who can help her, a family friend. But things do not go to plan and Renata winds up trying to survive an abduction. Marty had been trying to find out what happened to her. Now there are others looking as well.

The POV alternates among Jody, Pen, Renata, and Typh. Jody is our driving force, where we spend the most time. There are 89 chapters in the book. Jody gets 31, then Pen, 24, Renata, 18, and Typh, 16. The chapters are short, so the four stories move along at a lively clip, clearly a product of a screenwriter’s appreciation of pacing

It also makes it possible to read this whenever you have small bits of available time, if that is something you like to do.

Since this is California, wheeled transportation figures large. Almost all the characters are assigned an auto-trait, like hair or eye color, or age. Jody, for example, drives a gray pickup. Pen drives a Prius. People are tracked, as well as defined, by the cars they drive. There is an Acura, an Accord, an old Lexus sedan, a Ford Focus, even a Tesla, and plenty more. I only started keeping track part way through. It is a small, fun element. There are appealing. surprising cameos by a range of wild creatures. These include a kangaroo, a wobbegong shark, and a jaguar. The notion of moving from one reality to another is given a look beyond Pen’s particular take on it.

Mosberg offers sly commentary on local sub-cultures. He looks a bit at how good intentions are used for dark ends. One thing to be aware of, different characters are on unparallell timelines, although those timelines do intersect. Characters in adjoining chapters could be doing what they do months apart. I found it a wee bit disconcerting at first, as actual dates are not provided, but one soon gets used to it.

Character engagement – Jody is righteous, on an understandable truth-seeking quest. His motivation makes sense and he is easy to pull for. Pen is also on a quest, although it remains to be seen for us whether there is enough reality basis there for us to go all in with her. Wanting to find your lost father may be a noble ambition, but she may just be nuts. Pandora’s House may be just another conspiracy theory (she nurtures loads of those) Makes it a bit tougher to go all in for her emotionally. Renata is an innocent soul, a pure victim, beset by dark forces, just wanting a better life. But is there enough more about her in here to make us care beyond wanting her to escape? Typh is a decent sort, although, in order to provide for her family, she is willing to go legally and morally rogue. So, depending on what works for ya, you may find one or more of these four worthy of following. I enjoyed the weaving together of the strands, as they all continue to connect through Marty’s storehouse of intel.

There is a considerable cast of supporting actors. Two thuggish sorts were a particular delight, a source of considerable merriment. There are occasional bits in which this character or that is presented in a bit more depth, but that is not what this book is about. It is about the story, and, of course, the state.

Bottom line for me was that I really loved this book. It kept me interested, offered enough characters to care about, gave a peek into places and groups I have never experienced, in short it kept me entertained for the duration. You may or may not ever find your way to Pandora’s House, but you should have no trouble finding your way to a copy of My Dirty California.

“Various rumors exist about Pandora’s House. Some people say the architect Zaha Hadid was paid eight figures to design a top secret underground property in Southern California but she had to sign an NDA, and no one knows where it is. Another rumor suggests the Church of Scientology began building a two-hundred-million-dollar bunker but abandoned the project halfway through and sold the property to a couple millennials whose parents had made billions in the dot-com era, and they use the house to throw elaborate weeklong parties. Some say it’s where the notorious lizard people live underground. Other people say the house was constructed by the US government as a safe house for the top one percent in the case of an apocalyptic event.”
“Has anyone actually seen the house?” asks Matt.
“Lots of people claim to have. It’s difficult to know for sure.

Review posted – September 23, 2022

Publication date – August 30, 2022

I received an DRC (digital review copy) of My Dirty California from Simon & Schuster in return for a fair review, and surrendering certain tapes that had come into my possession. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Mosberg’s personal and Twitter pages

Profile
Jason Mosberg works as a screenwriter and TV creator in Los Angeles. He is the creator of the CBS All Access series One Dollar

Item of Interest from the author
—–Crime reads – Don’t Turn My Book Into a TV Serieson the fixation in Hollywood these days on Intellectual Property, or IP.

I first wrote My Dirty California as a pilot script and I gave it to a producer I knew—let’s call him Bob—a couple years ago. And at the time, Bob said he read the script and it wasn’t for him. A few days after the announcement of the sale of the book My Dirty California to Simon & Schuster, Bob called and said, “I heard you sold a book, what’s it about?” He was interested. And he had no recollection of the script I sent him because he probably didn’t bother to read it. That was just a script. But this? This is a book. This is IP.

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Filed under California, Fiction, Mystery, Reviews, Thriller

Tagged as Fiction, Mystery, Thriller