New Year Reading Projects

1. For the new year, I am once again attempting to write up everything I read, even if my write-ups are extremely short. Anyone want to join me?

2. I am back in an F/F mood, so will be trying to post more to fffriday. Possibly not exactly on Friday.

3. There is a new romantic suspense community, girlmeetstrouble. It has just started a group read of Madam, Will You Talk by Mary Stewart.

ETA: A bunch of Mart Stewart novels are currently $1.99 on Kindle, including Madam, Will You Talk?, Nine Coaches Waiting, and The Ivy Tree.

Wylding Hall, by Elizabeth Hand

A fantastic dark fantasy/understated horror/Gothic short novel about a group of musicians in the 60s who record an album at an old English house in one of those old English towns where everyone who lives there knows where not to go and what not to talk about. It's told entirely in interviews with the surviving band members and a few others, with complete with offhand remarks that are utterly chilling in context.

The style is very different from what I've read by hand before: very pared-down, as fits the conceit, while her other works I've read were very dense and lush. The style works beautifully with the old-school horror in which there is no graphic violence, no gore other than a few (fucking terrifying, in context) drops of blood, and almost everything is scarier for being glimpsed and hinted at rather than shown or explained.

And then every now and then something is shown, and it nearly gives you a heart attack.

( Read more... )

The band seems to be loosely based on Fairport Convention, which also spent a month at an old building rented by their manager so they could record an album and recover from a tragedy. (Their roadie fell asleep at the wheel; in the ensuing accident, all of them were injured, some severely, and their drummer Martin Lamble and Jeannie Franklyn, Richard Thompson's girlfriend, were killed.) Like the band in the novel, they were all in their late teens and early twenties. Though Julian, the singer/songwriter, seems based on Nick Drake.

The atmosphere of the 60s folk-rock scene is beautifully evoked, as is the atmosphere of creeping horror. I read this book before going to sleep, and dreamed that I was lost inside what had at first appeared to be a normal apartment complex, but I couldn't find my way out and I kept coming across horrifying things. The only one I remember was the sort of amusement-park type pool that has life-size dolphins attached to moving rods so they move above the water and then go under it. Only instead of fake dolphins, it was those horrible mummified "mermaids" made by sewing the top half of a monkey to the bottom half of a fish, and they were dolphin-sized and rotting.

The audio book has multiple narrators; I'd love to listen to that. But not at night.

Wylding Hall





skygiants, thanks so much for the rec!