Review: Needful Things

“Selfish people are happy people. I believe that with all my heart.”
– Leland Gaunt

What a book to read during the COVID-19 pandemic. Needful Things has been a wonderful companion to the supermarket aisles bare of whatever random products people thought they couldn’t live without during a shutdown, the companies firing employees without batting an eyelash, and the brazen citizens who are still out tugging on locked storefront doors, puzzled as to why they can’t get in to buy something they don’t really, well, need. All of it has been a stark reminder that, while the world itself is quite different now, people are still the same: full of greed, selfishness, and, wait…love, humility, and altruism, too.

It’s difficult to keep our latter traits in mind while enduring a crisis so simultaneously frightening and mind-numblingly dull as this. You may have noticed I stopped writing reviews for a while. I was convinced that my opinion didn’t matter in the face of this pandemic. Can you believe I was descending quickly into a pit of self-despair and hopelessness?

COVID-19 has highlighted my personal shortcomings in a way I never thought possible. I have never felt less articulate, capable, or intelligent. I have that American way of believing my worth depends directly upon my productivity, what I can accomplish, not upon my happiness, health, and sense of belonging.

I know, I’ve been a little slow on the uptake. And it’s because, like many other people, I’ve been monomaniacally focused myself. It’s taken me a surprisingly long time to realize that literally no one else is thinking about me. They’re all too busy worrying about themselves, too. Of course my opinion doesn’t matter! And that’s exactly why I shouldn’t be afraid to share it.

Thus far, I have avoided any Faustian pacts designed to prey upon my notions of what I think will make me happy. But I can’t say the same for most of the citizens of Castle Rock. Leland Gaunt seems to always have “just the thing,” and his prices are astonishingly cheap. All he wants you to do to compensate for it is a little favor: play a mean-spirited prank on a neighbor.

As a thrifter and antique shopper, I related so much to this concept. I know well how it feels to see some old thing in a store window that I just have to have, and I know what it’s like to always expect a price that is higher than what’s listed on the tag, even if what’s listed isn’t all that great of a deal. So personally, before the suitcase is even unlatched and the metaphors unpacked, Stephen King is handing me a winner.

I’ve started quite a few books lately that did not hold my attention, but coming back to a King novel is always like coming home. Needful Things is about two to three hundred pages too long, and that still did not stop me from devouring every word. I loved his protagonists, a small-town sheriff and a local business owner and seamstress with severe arthritis in her hands; their redeeming stories made the awfulness of the other townspeople tolerable. I adored his villain, Leland Gaunt, who was both a traditional and nontraditional depiction of Satan, complete with smoke coming out of his ears and a sense of revulsion from whomever becomes the victim of his handshakes.

King believes in his worlds. I can tell that, in the moment of composition, he is absolutely convinced of the reality of the story. He cares about his heroes and he hates his villains, but he doesn’t lose sight of the flaws of the former and the humanity of the latter. In fact, it’s often difficult to distinguish between the two (which is personally the way I think it should be).

Besides characterization, King shows off his talent for plot-building in this novel. Gaunt spends about 600 pages making everyone in the town mad enough at someone else that they could spit– then, he knocks over the first domino, sits back, and lights a cigar. King intricately weaves together these confrontations until they grow into a situation so out-of-control it seems impossible for the protagonists to stop it. Once you reach the tipping point in this novel, I defy you to put it down before you find out how it ends. Beginning it, especially in our current situation, is a bit like entering into a pact of your own. It’s too damn long, but you’ll get hooked by page 15 and have no choice but to see it through until page 684.

Review: American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction

Alright, it’s time to get a little academic. Don’t worry; for those of you who are all fiction and no interpretation, I’ll try to put the peas in the mashed potatoes.

As literary criticism goes, Bailey is very accessible. I read this book just about as quickly as I’d read a novel. The language is not at all pretentious, (let’s face it: some academics use what is supposed to be a shorthand, universal set of terms that should provide clarity in a discourse community as a way to flaunt their overabundance of brain cells) and Bailey interweaves nostalgia about his boyhood love of the horror genre into some very poignant observations about its cultural functions. If you’re new to lit crit, this book is a good place to start.

I did have to attempt to give Bailey the benefit of the doubt on some of his contentions, though; this book is dated. While he uses a feminist lens to examine Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Bailey fails to acknowledge the existence of both female and academic horror fans, seeming to forget that he bought one of those 250,000 first-edition copies of The Amityville Horror. I found his omission of female horror critics particularly strange, as he quoted both Carol J. Clover and Barbra Creed, both renowned critics of the horror genre. It does bother me when a critic holds him or herself above the masses, especially when it comes to popular fiction, conveniently using the word “they” to analyze horror audiences rather than the more fitting pronoun: “we.” If you’re going to begin a book by describing your love of horror, own that throughout your following interpretations. I continue to find attitudes that popular fiction is mediocre very distasteful in academics. [/rant]

Now that I got that out of my system, Bailey’s main premise is very interesting: that, after being filtered through Poe and Hawthorne, the haunted house story shifted from a focus on the individual ghost to a focus on the location itself, with no discernible, individual entity present. Furthermore, what was once the castle setting of the Gothic story became more intimate, with a concentration on the house, hotel, hospital, or asylum. Bailey chalks this up to people not feeling so great about everything from domestic gender roles to being fed up with capitalism, and applies this method of thinking to what he considers to be the great popular haunted house tales:

The final assertion Bailey makes is one that pleasantly surprised me: he correctly predicts future functions of popular haunted house fiction by examining the most current (for his day) novels of its type. He makes an observation that the genre is extremely adaptable; whatever collective anxieties, fears, angers we harbor, we’re sure to invent something that’s haunted to express them. The more widely-felt these emotions, the more it’s guaranteed that a particular story will sell, thus keeping this plot formula an important part of our society for a long time to come … well, possibly as long as books are still being written.

Thanks for being patient with me as I transition into the final year of my grad program. I’ve been occupied with thesis reading, internship proposal writing, Writing Center orientation, my job at the bookstore, and a post-surgery bunny rabbit. I’ll have the second part of the Congress Hotel series up sometime this week.

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.