A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

When the novel opens, Eric Ross has been on the run with his daughters Dess (18) and Stacy (7) for about a year. They've been living hand-to-mouth and in a succession of cheap motels, with Eric taking whatever jobs he can find (often low-level illegal) and Dess secretly starting to take some similar jobs of her own. We quickly learn that they're not wanted for any crime but are considered missing people; as they're Black, their case is not a priority with law enforcement. Eric and Dess have told Stacy that her mother is back home and will join them soon, but as they're co-conspirators in protecting Stacy both from whatever they're running from and why, it's not clear whether this is true or if the mother is even still alive.

So when Eric spots a want ad for someone to stay in a locally notorious haunted house in the small town of Degener, Texas, with a whole lot of money promised to document paranormal activity on the premises, he jumps at it. But his employer Eunice, an elderly white woman who basically owns the town, isn't being altogether straight with him over exactly why previous tenants failed. The house is a "spite house" - a bizarrely narrow and tall construction built on a tiny slice of land specifically to spite someone nearby, either by looming over them or blocking their view. (This is a real thing.)

The Spite House is a first novel. I'd heard of it already, but bought it after listening to a non-spoilery interview with the author on a podcast, A Pyroclastic Flow of Negative Energy. Johnny Compton (what a great name!) was tremendously likable on it.

The biggest strength of the book is that Stacy and Dess are also tremendously likable, and the other characters are, if not always likable, very sympathetic and believable, or, if not sympathetic, vivid. I was rooting for Eric, Dess, and Stacy so hard. Their relationship as a family and as individual duos is so well-done. There's also a fascinating relationship with their now-dead great-grandfather.

I particularly liked the Eric & Dess relationship, which is a type I'm not sure I've ever seen in fiction before. They're a father and daughter, but the daughter is on the very cusp of adulthood, and they're both transitioning from a child-daughter to an adult-daughter relationship, and due to both personality and circumstances, they're also currently relating to each other as equals and co-parents. It's really interesting and well-done.

The prose is also very good, and the book feels very real apart from the supernatural goings-on. Degener feels like a real place, and its inhabitants like real people. Both people and places have a depth of history and relationships that's very rich and real. There's also a plot turn about halfway through that knocked my socks off.

The book has some big problems as well. In the interview, Compton mentioned that his publisher had limited the book's length as he was a first time author. On the one hand, the book would have benefited from more length as there's a number of elements that felt slighted or missing. On the other hand, portions are slow and feel like not much is happening, so there's an issue with imbalance as well. There's multiple POVs that are fine in themselves but added to the feeling of imbalance; at the current length, it would have been better to limit the POVs to Eric, Dess, and Stacy.

In terms of the spite house itself, Compton focuses mostly on the element of spite in general. There's not as much time spent on the house as a scary place with weird geography as I would have liked.

But my biggest problem with the book was that some very significant elements never got any resolution.

( EXTREME SPOILERS! I really enjoyed not being spoiled for this! )

In conclusion, a book with some excellent aspects and some glaring flaws. I'll definitely read his next book.

Content notes: Depictions of historical and current racism. Child harm/death (in the past). But it's all non-graphic. This is not a gory, violent, or gruesome book at all.

Sometimes one reads a book in circumstances which make the book forever inextricable in one's mind with a specific place or mood. Whenever I think of Le Guin's Tehanu or Toni Morrison's Beloved, I remember afternoon sunlight on carpet and a view of a very blue swimming pool through a sliding glass door; I read A Dance with Dragons on the overnight leg of a very long plane ride with all lights but mine turned off because I was too uncomfortable to sleep, becoming more and more annoyed with both the book and the situation as I plowed through the thing.

Who is Frances Rain? is a semi-classic Canadian children's book from 1987, and while based solely on the book itself I would not normally have found it all that memorable, the reading experience sure was.

It begins with an arresting prologue by the first-person narrator, teenage Lizzie, saying that it's a ghost story. For once the prologue probably was necessary, because the ghost doesn't turn up until halfway through the book. The first half is a realistic problem novel about blended families and parent-child problems.

Lizzie's father walked out on the family about a year ago, and the three kids haven't heard from him since. Lizzie's mother married a man who clearly is extremely nice and trying very hard, but Lizzie and her brother hate him because he's not their father. (Her little sister adores him, though.) All of them, stepdad included, are on a trip to visit Grandma who lives near a tiny island. Halfway through the book, Lizzie finds a pair of glasses on the island which enable her to see scenes from the life of Frances Rain, who used to live there.

The climax/ending of the book, which ties together the ghost story and the family story, is quite well-done. But for my taste, there was too much family and not enough ghost.

I read this book (after starting and abandoning several others) while getting my hair done at a local salon which I was trying for the first time. I did a full rainbow, so I was there for quite a long time while other clients came and got their hair done and were replaced by new clients.

I started out reading Prairie Fires, nonfiction about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her historical context, but abandoned it (for later, not forever) in when I realized that it had already covered a lot of historical context in quite dense detail and I was only 10% in. It was too hard to follow given the salon conversations I was trying to ignore.

Then I tried reading The Long Earth by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett, about parallel worlds and SUPPOSEDLY a WWI soldier who falls into one. He appears in a prologue, then vanishes for the next 25% of the book which was as far as I got. If I had to guess how Baxter and Pratchett collaborated based solely on the reading experience, I'd say that Pratchett provided two zany ideas and then Baxter did everything else.

A design for parallel world exploration, powered by a potato (I'm guessing this was Pratchett's first idea) appears online and children across the world build it. They go to a parallel Earth, throw up, and freak out. Only one kid does not throw up, and is also the only one who figures out that you can turn the dial the other way to go back. He grows up to be a very very special person, the only one on Earth who can go to parallel worlds without getting briefly nauseated and also the only person who doesn't freak out when alone on a world. He teams up with a soda machine that's legally recognized as the reincarnation of a Tibetan bicycle repairman (I'm guessing this was Pratchett's second idea) to investigate something. Meanwhile, the effects of easy travel to empty parallel worlds are explored.

This doesn't sound boring but it was incredibly boring. Permanent DNF.

I then started Who is Frances Rain?

While I was going from book to book in an effort to not listen to the client/hairdresser conversations, I began live-blogging the experience:

11:46 AM: They have been talking about cancer for TWO HOURS. Client's father has cancer, prompting reminisces of everyone's relatives with cancer.

12:16 PM: The salon is now discussing orthopedic injuries.

12:17 PM: Someone with Parkinson's fell off a roof.

12:18 PM: Getting a blow by blow account of surgery and recovery.

1:02 PM: We're now back to chemo.

1:18 PM: Dementia.

1:22 PM: There were brief breaks discussing other stuff, plus some blessedly silent stretches. But I now know exactly what a Whipple Procedure is and now I have a new phobia.

1:35 PM: Paris Hilton was a student at the hairdressing school my hairdresser went to.

Amazingly, she didn't die.

[By now I'm reading Who is Frances Rain? in the hope that it will be an entertaining ghost story. So far, no ghosts. But...]

1:43 PM: In the book I've been attempting to read while all this is going on, the characters have spent multiple chapters failing to notice that Grandma is clearly having a heart attack. She keeps rubbing her left arm.

Maybe she needs a Whipple Procedure.

1:44 PM: "Are you okay, Gran?" Her skin had a dusky grayness behind it.

"I'm fine. Just winded."

1:59 PM: Gran looked pretty wiped out by the time the dishes were done.

2:03 PM: "But remember," said Doc, shaking her finger all round. "There can be no stress in her life right now."

2:33 PM: Breaking news from the salon: a sinkhole has opened. Somewhere.

2:51 PM: A client blamed immigrants for the drought.

I now have a dilemma re: should I ever go back because my hair is AMAZING.

3:03 PM: I'm home! I am now going to light a fire and have a restorative nip of brandy in front of it.

PS. Grandma lived! Shocker.

A children’s book from the 80s which I somehow missed, as I missed everything by Hahn, but I have remedied this now thanks to recs from sovay and skygiants.

Like a Brady Bunch gone wrong, a blended family has been formed, consisting of Jean and her two children, 12-year-old Molly and 10-year-old Michael, and Dave and his 7-year-old daughter Heather, whose mother died in a fire when she was 3. Heather hates the entire idea, and takes her unhappiness out fighting with her new siblings and then blaming them.

Because nothing helps a difficult family dynamic like suddenly uprooting everyone and then isolating them together, the parents move them from Baltimore to a secluded church converted into a house, a mile from anywhere, complete with a graveyard in the backyard. This freaks out Molly to begin with, and she gets even more alarmed when Heather gets obsessed with the grave of a 7-year-old child—her age—marked only with the initials H.E.H—her initials.

When Molly spots Heather at the grave talking to an unseen person she calls Helen, Heather accuses her of spying and says threateningly, “Wait till Helen comes.”

AIEEEEEEE!

A very satisfying, eerie ghost story, playing on elements of grief, guilt, and family. Molly, not Heather, is the narrator, and once she realizes that Heather may be in as much or more danger as anyone, she’s put in the difficult position of trying to save someone she doesn’t like, who doesn’t like her and doesn’t want to be saved, when no one else even believes there’s a problem.

I was delighted to discover that many of Hahn’s books are currently in print. If you’ve read others, what do you recommend?

Wait Till Helen Comes: A Ghost Story