Book Review: Rebecca

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“In the car going home I sat in my corner, biting my thumb nail, seeing the great hall at Manderley thronged with people … and I could see Maxim standing at the foot of the stairs, laughing, shaking hands, turning to someone who stood by his side, tall and slim, with dark hair … dark hair against a white face, someone whose quick eyes saw to the comfort of her guests, who gave an order over her shoulder to a servant, someone who was never awkward, never without grace, who when she danced left a stab of perfume in the air like a white azalea.”

My partner and I are currently looking for houses. We can’t afford much, but it’s fun to drive around on Sundays and pretend we’re in the market for a real stunner. We’ve pulled over outside many a palatial estate while I briefly wax sentimental about having a library, study, an art room for him, and a music room we don’t even use. I dream about “forever homes” and the work I’ll do to them. In these fantasies, I even own a pair of overalls, in which I paint every room using the color palette I already have picked out. Somehow, I know things about wallpapering and creating mosaic backsplashes over the sink and stove in the kitchen. The home is, of course, a great Victorian with original woodwork and Tiffany light fixtures.

This probably sounds like a great deal of snobbery to you, but I understand my own psychology, and I can tell you it comes from an innocent, if naive place. I remember taking evening walks in my first serious boyfriend’s neighborhood and imagining each house as ours. I was enamored by domesticity, which is not really much of a surprise. When I was growing up, my mother took extremely good care of her house. She had a matching candle for every holiday. She wanted our surroundings to look as much like a soothing fairy tale as possible, and because we effectively lived in a forest preserve, this wasn’t difficult. By the time I was 16, I pretty much felt like a Disney princess.

But the idea of a home that is truly mine has thus far been a fantasy. When I moved out of my parents’ house, I lived in a shitty one bedroom apartment with my shitty ex, too broke from waiting tables to pay even half the rent, and then dragged that misery all the way across the country to the West coast. There, I cleaned the houses of the rich, trying not to gag from the mold in the showers, sneaking an occasional rest in a princess chair, and trying to befriend the household cats, who were possibly more privileged than their owners. Now I live in the crumbling house I’ve always wanted with landlords who are possibly shittier than my ex and I’m in constant fear it will have burned down every time I return from work.

This is all to say that a book that begins with the phrase, “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again” is almost too personal to write about.

But it’s not just the dream-house motif that often accompanies a Gothic romance that makes this novel nearly undiscussable for me. It’s that the unnamed narrator matches my self-detrimental thought processes turn for turn.

What if, when I finally have it, I’m not good enough for this dream house? What if I am a frumpy, mousy tenant, nowhere near as lustrous and intriguing as the previous owner? What if I am slovenly, cannot manage the way the house is run, cannot keep up with my own business and projects, prove to be incompetent? What if I can’t maintain control over my own life, living space, work space? Worst of all, what if I don’t deserve to be happy on my own terms?

Du Maurier’s narrator suffers from the same generalized anxiety, imposter syndrome, and self-worth issues that many young women do. But without actually getting in her head, her mental illness is just that: a term. Inside her head, we can identify the thought patterns, with just enough coercion from others, that lead her to such a dark place. And it stings like ice. Now approaching 30, I’m growing tired of the same self-sabotage that keeps me from being the best I can be. I’m sick of comparing myself to other women physically, emotionally, intellectually, financially, and finding that I fall short on each count.

But I don’t know that Rebecca offers a solution to these problems. Like the new Mrs. de Winter, I beat myself down to a level of despair that can only be resolved by anger. With this anger comes a brief flare of confidence, during which I accomplish as much as I possibly can; but inevitably, I flail and begin to sink.

I turn the corner, and the dream house is ablaze.

Reviews: The Haunting of Hill House & We Have Always Lived in the Castle

O Female Gothic, you are my favorite sub-genre!

I love books like this because they’re never merely decorative. They always have something important to say– although, what they do have to say is always nuanced and almost never fully clear. Shirley Jackson is a prime example, like Margaret Atwood, of those sly, evasive female authors with a serious feminist bone to pick.  I’m itching to read Private Demons, Judy Oppenheimer’s biography on Jackson, as so many themes of Jackson’s life appear in her novels.

Jonathan Lethem’s introduction to the Penguin Deluxe Edition of We Have Always Lived in the Castle comments on quite a few of these: both Hill House and Castle heavily explore the multifaceted female self, covering everything from narcissism to paranoia and social anxiety. If you’ve read her famous short story, “The Lottery,” you’ll also know that Jackson was fascinated with group behavior, particularly the ways in which it can go wrong, and quickly. Although these novels are two separate entities, they are very similar at their core (which is why I chose to review them together).

Most say that Castle is Jackson’s best work. I was personally captured by Hill House and enjoyed it even more on a second read. Hill House carries a dreamy, surreal quality that makes the reader just as vulnerable to its manipulation as its main character. Through Eleanor, Jackson addresses issues with domestic expectations: after living only to perform housework and act as caregiver to her now deceased mother, Eleanor longs for her own domestic realm, only to find through Hill House that society does not allow women to have one on their own terms. Plus, there’s a potentially accidental poltergeist. I won’t spoil the ending here, but it’s a horror story. Things never turn out well for the impressionable.

Although there are no supernatural elements to Castle, Jackson’s quirkier and funnier sides emerge in her last complete novel. If you have an affinity for gallows humor and just plain weirdness bordering on magical realism, this is the novel for you. Merricat can be read as a nightmare of raising children; while I see the merit in this interpretation, I found myself sympathizing with her as a representation of my worst self. Castle will make you laugh at things you’re not supposed to find funny.

I really don’t want to say much more about these books. They’re classics, and especially for Hill House, not only notable within their genre but well-renowned in general. My belief is that they’re something you should experience without knowing too much ahead of time. Preconceived notions and interpretations water down the richness of coy literary giants like these; so, grab a cup of tea, sit in a comfy armchair, and get ready to be spooked. And to think about societal issues.

Thanks for enduring another review! I have some exciting things coming. Part II of my series on the Camposanto Monumentale  will be coming later this week. I also have a new camera on the way, so hopefully that will arrive before I go to the Oddities and Curiosities Expo and take a special four-hour ghost tour at Chicago Hauntings this Saturday. Pictures will follow!

Until next time,

N.

 

 

Review: The Ghost Hunters

My segment on the podcast requires a lot of research this week, so I’m pushing the Campo Santo post back yet again. However, my goal for the rest of the summer is to read 100 pages a day, so I bring you yet another book review!

I do love me a good epistolary novel! At 522 pages, this one was still not too long, considering it spans from the late 1920’s to somewhere in the 50’s or 60’s. The pacing was decent, only dragging during a couple of moments throughout and never seeming rushed; a tough feat for stories of this nature. In his Author’s Note, Spring shows his knowledge of the “layered narrative” as”a well-worn technique in the ghost-story genre” (521). I think he executed it well for how difficult it is to mimic classic stories that use this modus operandi.

In fact, what I appreciate most about Ghost Hunters is how evident Spring makes his love for research, history, and deducing the reason for our need of the paranormal through his main character, Sarah Grey. He found this important enough to include the fact that he wrote his thesis on “the significance of paranormal events” in his author bio, which immediately made me warm to him. It’s clear he wants us to understand which bits of the story were taken from real historical events, photographic evidence, and personal correspondence/media and which were fabricated for the purpose of the story. The amount of detail he went into on the subjects of Harry Price and the Borley Rectory case is astounding, and it is worth reading the book for this alone.  I did find the writing a bit lacking in some areas (“I melted into his embrace” = not a thing) but marrying creative writing and historical research is hard, people, and I don’t think that should be overlooked.

Sarah Grey was a very interesting character; here, again, we have an unreliable female narrator that is pulled off pretty well by a male author. Though he clearly has his plate full with all the detail, tweaks he’s making to history, and several attempts at plot twists, he doesn’t neglect Sarah’s substance for the rest. I was very frustrated with Sarah for not taking charge of her situation, but I soon came to realize that feeling that way would be totally hypocritical. At one time or another, pretty much all of us have been sucked in by someone who is charming, manipulative, and a total narcissistic liar. So, I remain firm in the opinion that Sarah’s character isn’t a reason to give the story a lesser rating. If you want perfect women, read a Harlequin romance!

While we’re on the subject of gender, I thought that this story was another prime example of frustration over gender roles. We have the staunch, reasonable, masculine “scientist” who wants to prove that ghosts aren’t real, and we have a bunch of females (and one male) with some real power as mediums, or at least with some good common sense intuition. We also have some fake female mediums, and these types believe that a seance should be extra flashy.  On one of the spectrum: hyper-masculinity. On the other: hyper-femininity. Feeling like we have to strictly adhere to either one of these extremes when experiencing, interpreting, and influencing the world around us, can lead to ruin. But somewhere in the middle, where we’re able to balance both, lies the sweet spot. I think this story, in its way, highly advocates gender fluidity and shows both the merits and downfalls of what we label as “masculine” and “feminine” behavior. It kind of tells us how important it is for us as humans not to stay solely in one fabricated category, but to be able to travel between the two; and this, in turn, takes away our capacity for prejudice in certain areas. Both the prejudice that ghosts absolutely can’t be real, and the assumption that every scratching noise is a malevolent entity.

For me, the interactions between the characters and trying to interpret the reason for their motives was far more entertaining than trying to predict the plot twists, which, to me, didn’t seem all that revelatory. This is a pretty formulaic ghost story; it’s an age-old tradition and there’s nothing wrong with that, but the consequence for me as a reader was that I had things figured out halfway through the book– which not only made Sarah Grey seem a little nearsighted but also kind of made me wonder what the author thought of his readers’ deduction skills. This is mostly my reason for giving three and a half stars.

As far as the scare-factor goes: nothing was too frightening, but the apparition of the nun did start to creep up on me. Especially post-Conjuring 2. She was reminiscent of one of my favorite ghost stories, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black. Overall, if you haven’t experienced something like this and you’re into haunted house narratives, I’d recommend giving this one a go.

Price, Harry. The End of Borley Rectory. Harrap & Co., Ltd., 1946. http://www.harrypricewebsite.co.uk/Borley/ModernBorley/modernphotographs.htm.

Is that the, uh,  the full-body apparition of a nun in the window? Okay. It’s cool. It’s fine. We’re all fine here. Let’s just move on.

Of course, Borley Rectory is a real place. Or was. You can’t visit it today; it was gutted by fire in 1939 and they tore it down in 1944. This is probably just as well, since in 2000, Louis Mayerling, a frequent visitor to the house until its destruction, published a very aptly-titled book by the name of We Faked the Ghosts of Borley Rectory, exposing the hauntings as a hoax perpetrated and perpetuated by several families over time. However, in keeping with the theme of The Ghost Hunters, Mayerling did experience an event during a seance at the Rectory that he could not explain. So who knows?

As for Harry Price, he too was a real person. I’ll leave out any speculations about his personality and earnestness, partly because that could be a post on its own, and partly because I want you to experience the trust, doubt, anger, and scepticism I did while reading the book without your opinions being colored by any real-life documentation of his character. Spring clears up the line between fact and fiction a bit in his Authors Notes, but in the end, his guess about who Harry Price really was is probably as good as ours. And that is one of the greatest strengths of this novel: its ability to make you believe, doubt, and question in a single breath.

Review: The House of Small Shadows

At first, I thought I wouldn’t be able to get into this book for a reason that many of you may find arbitrary. Sentence fragments. A lot of them. Every page. Used for emphasis. But mostly. Just breaking up the flow of the writing. Something like this wouldn’t normally get to me, especially when used sparingly and by someone with a good eye for where they should go, but I’ve never read a book before where the sentence structure was so distracting it made me unable to get into the story for a good seventy pages. Eventually, though, I got used to it because I was so immersed in the story world.

Now that that’s out of the way, Nevill got so many things right here. Male authors writing from a female’s perspective (or about women at all) has been a subject of recent social media mockery, but Catherine is a finely-conceived unreliable narrator with a history of mental illness that I don’t believe is overdone or inaccurate. I’ve been through enough CBT for a lifetime, and I can tell you that Catherine’s inner monologue and her attempt to correct negative or paranoid thinking seems pretty spot on. I really appreciate the upsurge of sympathetic unreliable/imperfect female narrators in the last six years or so, and it seems to pretty effectively put a damper on postfeminist ideas brought on by books like Confessions of a Shopaholic and Bridget Jones’ Diary. If you’re interested in this line of thought and have a couple of hours to kill, please read Stephanie Gwin’s amazing thesis, “‘The More You Deny Me, The Stronger I Get’: Exploring Female Rage in The Babadook, Gone Girl, and Girl on the Train.”

To flip off the intellectual switch for a moment, another thing that I feel Nevill gets right for horror fans is the creepiness of the doll, marionette, or taxidermied animal. If you are naturally frightened of any of the above, omychrist do I think you’re in for a couple of nights with the closet light on. This isn’t one of my personal scares, but I could sense that he was really upping the creep factor with the aesthetics of the taxidermy workshop and the unseeing (but seeing) eyes of the doll.

The last element I appreciated was Nevill’s juggling of several different themes. This novel explores, among other insecurities: the terror of those who hold onto antiquated ideas, the grotesquerie of childhood play, fear of one’s capability of violence, and the way that the bullied can become future bullies. Not to mention a good old healthy dollop of a fear of preservation after death, which could be a great modern critique of embalming. But that’s a post for another time.

Overall, I’m not sure the twist or the length of the story worked for me; the book was a bit long, and I didn’t feel the twist was very … twisty. But I loved so much about this novel that I didn’t really care about some of the more formulaic elements of the plot. It brought so much more that was unique, or at least creatively combined, to my horror reading experience that I can overlook that. And when you’re done, you’ll be left wondering what the hell you just read, in a really good way. If you liked the movie Dead Silence, this is the book companion for you.

Morris, Pat and Joanna Ebenstein. Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy. Constable & Robinson, 2013. https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/l/91Aoztc9asL.jpg.

I also wanted to comment briefly on the WHAT THE HELL! ARE THOSE DEAD KITTENS HAVING TEA? real-life elements of this novel. In the back of the book, you’ll find a list of references in the acknowledgements that shows the author clearly did his homework on Victorian living, fashion, and taxidermy. He does go quite into detail on taxidermic practice, which is another thing that makes this book stand out for me.

But even more astounding is that his story’s main villain is based on a real Victorian taxidermist, Walter Potter. If you want to find out more about him, you can check out the book I referenced in the picture caption. See? Citations aren’t always boring and ugly. Sometimes they give you more pictures of dead rabbits dressed up as schoolchildren to look at.

I wanted to take the time to thank everyone who has subscribed. This blog is still very small, but mighty. Most of those who have subscribed are strangers, so I know that you did so out of genuine interest and not out of any weird obligation you felt to be nice. This is purely a passion project that I make room for during my usual crazy schedule, so knowing that even a few people are enjoying this makes it even more worth it.

I promise I’ll have some different content for you very soon! I know I’ve announced on the podcast that I have a post on the Campo Santo Monumentale mausoleum in Pisa in the works, but it’s going to be a multi-part post and my summer brain is lazy on research. There are interesting photos to share that I took, but I also want to dig up as much info as I can on the monument and on the individual gravesites I photographed. In the meantime, there is an Oddities and Curiosities Expo at the end of July I will be attending, and I just bought a new refurbished camera. I also have other ideas for posts, so hang in there!

Review: The Elementals

“Savage mothers eat their children up …”

Finally; a Gothic beach read!

Perhaps I shouldn’t say, “Finally.” This book was published as part of the paperback horror craze of the 70’s and 80’s, but Valancourt has recently taken on the responsibility of republishing works that they feel should have been more enduring. I definitely agree with their choice, here; I may have never come across this one if it weren’t for the availability of a shiny, new copy.

This novel follows all the classic “haunted house” tropes while still somehow standing as its own unique story with its own flavor. The writing is at times humorous, but McDowell has a gift for putting you in his world of Beldame, the set of three large, isolated Victorian houses on the Gulf Coast, which the Savage and McCray families choose to visit after the death of the Savage family matriarch. It has a weird habit of allowing the lackadaisical beach-life to creep into its prose so that, at moments, you almost– if it weren’t for the creeping sense of something wrong– could forget you weren’t reading an entirely different sort of book.

The long-abandoned third house in The Elementals and the spirits it holds serve as a perfect allegory for the conflict, dishonesty, and secrets that each member of this family has bottled up for decades. I won’t tell you too much, and neither will the book, but I really enjoyed simmering over possible correlations between certain events and the haunting after I had finished. I don’t like to know where a book is going while I’m reading it. Sometimes it’s okay to not know where it went when I’m done, either.

My biggest complaint is that the story’s a bit racist throughout. The Savages have a housekeeper named Odessa (who is also your stereotypical, secretive, witchy-woo-woo black servant, but my other problem is that most of the characters are pretty one-dimensional), and the author will not stop referring to her as “the black woman.” It happens perhaps every twenty pages. We get it; she’s black. The author doesn’t refer to the rest of the characters as “the white woman” or “the white man” or “the white girl” when he wants to use something more descriptive than a name. It got really wearing. It’s not even attempting to be used as some sort of commentary on a black woman in the 80’s working for a wealthy, white family, as the reader is clearly supposed to sympathize with most of the characters, who often won’t stop talking about how they have so much money they just don’t know what to do with it! I gave the book four stars because it was a good story, but it might’ve gotten five if this problem wasn’t so prevalent. I’d like to chalk it up to being a product of its time, but it’s seriously distracting. Only read this if you think you can stomach it.

Review: The Coffin Path

As “haunted house” narratives go, this is a pretty unique one; it’s set in the 17th century instead of the 19th or modern-day, and switches back and forth between the perspective of a shepherdess/mistress of an estate and that of the mysterious man she hires as a winter worker. My favorite part about the novel is that it’s wonderfully atmospheric. If you want something that will immerse you in the desolation of the foggy and treacherous Yorkshire moors, ancient myths of blasphemous heathen rites (HA), and a candlelit mansion where a demonic entity leaves gold coins to portend the fall of the family line, this is the book for you.

All of the main characters are extremely well-devised, so by the middle of the story, you’ll feel as if they’re real people. That’s a difficult sleight of hand for an author to perform, especially the further removed from us the characters are in time. Mercy isn’t just your stock bad-ass female; she has deep-seated problems, and her struggle between the need/desire to perform masculine behavior to keep the farm running and the pressure from society to conform to female domestic gender roles is probably more interesting than the actual haunting. In my opinion, that’s the test of a well-conceived “haunted house” story; the haunting’s just there to emphasize the very real and relatable problems the characters face. However, I did find myself wishing that the supernatural parts were scarier (the haunted fire screen got me a little bit, but overall, I just wanted more!).

I also found the novel to be a bit lengthy. It was a fairly quick read, but my main complaint is that it often felt like the same conversations and inner monologue were reoccurring over and over. In Gothic literature, this is often the way that tension is built in a narrative. While I did feel some tension, it got to the point where I was slowing down and it was taking me quite a while to finish the book. Perhaps due to this, the ending didn’t impact me as much as I thought it would after I became so invested in the characters and what was going to happen to them. Overall, if you haven’t experienced a story like this before, it’s worth reading; if you’re very familiar, though, I’d skip it.