A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Millie just got out of jail, which makes her unemployable. She's young, pretty, homeless, and desperate. So she's delighted when she gets hired as a housemaid for a wealthy family. Needless to say, the family turns out to be very weird and possibly very sinister...

Love the cover and blurb, but they're misleading. The story isn't about Millie learning the secrets of a wealthy family by spying on them, whether though a keyhole or because they don't pay attention to her. She does learn their secrets, but she's in the middle of the action and very much noticed at all times.

This book is widely scorned and also accused of plagiarism. I looked up the book it supposedly plagiarized, and while there are some significant similarities, there's other books that also contain similar scenes and plot points. I could be wrong because I didn't read the one it supposedly plagiarized, but it seems at least as likely that books in the same genre may have a lot in common. It's also a bestseller, not just in general but specifically at my bookshop, which is why I read it.

I can see why it's a bestseller. It's extremely entertaining. I could not put it down. Millie deals with a possibly evil child, a hostile lunatic of a wife, a sexy but probably sinister husband, a sexy but suspicious Italian gardener, and a completely batshit plot that combines gothic with domestic thriller. The twists weren't totally shocking but they were fun, and the ending was very satisfying. I get why people like it. I liked it.

Content notes: Domestic abuse, gaslighting, violence.

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.

So a little while back I read this absolutely batshit contemporary mashup of Jane Eyre and Rebecca called Verity, by ginormous bestseller Colleen Hoover. Do not click on this or any links unless you're OK with spoilers for it.

Then cahn read Verity.

Then snacky also read Verity.

And then! snacky made an amazing discovery! COLLEEN HOOVER WROTE A NEW EPILOGUE FOR VERITY. It's posted on Reddit, in two parts, and the three of you who have read Verity or the many of you who just read the spoilers need to read it immediately and discuss in comments to this post.

Absolutely no need for rot13 or other forms of spoiler protection in the comments! Don't read the comments unless you want to be spoiled for the new epilogue!

New epilogue, Part I

New epilogue, Part II

This is how I come to kill my father. It begins like this.

The Girl From Rawblood is a historical Gothic thriller following several intertwined families which seem to be cursed. It jumps back and forth in time and from character to character, but is never confusing and is always intensely engaging. I don't want to give too much of the plot away, because so much of the fun is discovering how the pieces fit together and seeing what happens next. I will say that it involves a mansion which is haunted by... something.

It's one of the best books I've read this year. After I read Ward's Sundial and then The Last House on Needless Street, cahn and I read this together, starting chapters at the same time and chatting on messenger.

This was extremely fun and at some point we will do it again with Little Eve, which is the last Catriona Ward book we haven't read yet. I loved her other two books, but I loved Rawblood the most.

It has a very timeless feel; a lot of it could have been written in any era of Gothics and ghost stories, though it's more graphically violent than would have been written in the 1800s, and involves explicit rather than implicit queerness.

It has approximately three shocking twists per chapter. It's a Gothic which packs in every possible Gothic trope you can imagine. But it's not just about twists. There are multiple narrators, all very well distinguished and most narrated in a very individual style. Ward did an amazing job not only of differentiating them, but of getting me emotionally invested in almost every single character. It's also an extremely emotional book.

Some of it is very difficult to read. There are cruel experiments on rabbits, including a passage which I skipped entirely once I saw where it was going. There's also an extremely upsetting section set in an insane asylum, which is even more awful than you might imagine.

But it isn't all horror. Terrible things happen to the characters, and many of them do terrible things, but almost always out of love; often misguided or twisted or obsessional love, but love nonetheless. In an afterword which is well worth reading, Ward says that she doesn't pity her characters because she feels that they lived full emotional lives and loved and were loved, which is the best that anyone can hope for.

Though much of the book is tragic, I didn't find it depressing, other than in certain specific sections. It's more of a wild, intense ride. I found the ending very moving and, depending on your interpretation and perspective, hopeful and satisfying.

Now let's talk about the twists. Seriously don't click on the cut if you intend to read this book.

( Read more... )

I am now completely obsessed with Catriona Ward. I look forward to reading Little Eve and her book that's forthcoming next year.

Content notes: EVERYTHING. Animal harm and cruel experimentation, cruel treatment of people in historical mental asylums, child abuse, violence, rape, miscarriages/stillbirths, probably more things I'm forgetting.

That was SO SATISFYING. My favorite part was the middle (Marian's narration) but I was not disappointed with the rest. I love that a book written in 1860, which gives so much time to make tropes stale and old, still managed to pull off so many genuine gasp-out-loud moments and startling twists.

Marian is still the best. All else is spoilery.

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My only real disappointment was that it mentions in passing that a certain character can turn dead humans into a stone-like substance that will preserve them forever, and this never comes up again. I want my human corpse statues!

Which Wilkie Collins book shall I read next?

Do any of them have good audio versions?

Are there any good filmed adaptations of The Woman in White?

The Woman in White (Penguin Classics)

I have just started reading the classic epistolatory mystery novel/Gothic from 1860. I've read Walter Hartright's first chapter and Vincent Gilmore, Solicitor's chapter. So far I have somehow remained completely unspoiled for this book so please do not spoil me!

While Collins sometimes goes on and on and on, he also has extremely propulsive storytelling that makes it obvious why this is a classic. Also, there's a lot of funny bits, which I was not expecting. It's tremendously fun and while it has many now-familiar tropes, it doesn't feel at all stale; I have only the vaguest guesses about where it's all going.

Walter Hartwell is a young drawing teacher who's offered a position teaching painting to two young women at Limmeridge House. On his way there, walking down a dark road at night, a hand suddenly touches his shoulder! A woman in white has appeared out of nowhere!

She requests his help getting a carriage, mentions that she has fond memories of the mistress of Limmeridge House, and says she's afraid of a Baronet. He helps her out, but after she's gone two men appear, searching for a woman in white: "She has escaped from my Asylum. Don't forget: a woman in white."

Hartwell says nothing.

( And then many, many more exciting events occur! )

Once again, no plot spoilers for the rest of the book! But I would love to discuss what's happened up to now.

The Woman in White (Penguin Classics)

Lucy Culpepper, an orphan pianist with a heart condition and crossed incisors that make her look like a squirrel, was raised by her asshole uncle who squanders her inheritance. All she wants is to study piano from a dying pianist in England, but she can't afford to go... until said asshole uncle sends her on a wild goose chase to see if her ninety-something great-aunt Fenella, an unrecognized genius outsider artist who does painted/embroidered/multimedia Biblical paintings, is actually dead and someone else is cashing her minuscule pension checks.

Lucy goes and meets the dying pianist, and they fall in love. They then spend the entire book apart as he's too sick to travel and she's trying to track down her great-aunt, who lived her whole life with another woman who recently died falling off a cliff. Or maybe her great-aunt is dead and being impersonated by her partner. Or maybe it is the great-aunt pretending to impersonate her partner! A farrago of bizarre events follows, including many strangely charming meetings with a Turkish doctor (unless he's just pretending to be Turkish), several old people's homes, a trio of escaped convicts, a cat everyone wants to kill (which does get killed, FYI), a cat that may or may not have died years ago, and a live cat that may or may not be the killed-by-a-fox-years-ago cat.

I almost forgot to mention that Lucy becomes psychic when she has a migraine.

I'm calling this a Gothic because it was published as one and the cover depicts a woman fleeing a menacing house. However, as I guessed before reading it based on the author, it's actually very hard to categorize generically, is both very funny and very dark, and parodies everything from Gothics to British food to outsider artists to seductive Turks in romances to the sort of idyllic English towns also parodied in Cold Comfort Farm, which this book also slightly resembles. In fact I'm sure it contains many parodies that I didn't catch as I'm unfamiliar with the originals.

I enjoyed this a lot. It's funny, sad, and very very strange. Also very very Joan Aiken.

I am going to quote ALL the Goodreads reviews of this book, including one mostly in German, because all of them together give you a good idea of what it's like to read this book:

Three stars. What a strange novel. It drew me in immediately, and left me thinking after I finished it.

One star. So terrible.

Three stars. Such an odd book this, but written well...Joan Aiken is impressive. I wish I could have had a chance to hear her speak about her books and to ask her some questions. I do very much like definitive answers. lol. One thing is for sure, it is not the kind of novel that I forgot about the next day when moving on to my next. In this respect, she achieved something that other gothic novelists are not known for doing. Get to the ending yourself and we will "talk". :)

Four stars. ich würde auch 5 sterne geben wenn das ende nicht so...so...so "wait what? wtfh???" gewesen wäre. an sich war das buch toll, sehr leichtfüßig und spannend geschrieben, die netten charaktere waren sympathisch und die bösen böse wie es sich gehört. aber das ende, man, man, man.

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Of all the new-to-me books by Stephen King that I’ve read in the last year, this and the middle Dark Tower books are the ones I’ve re-read the most. I’ve re-read Duma Key three times in the last two years, and I can tell it’s a book I’ll keep coming back to. Here’s the first page:

How to draw a picture


Start with a blank surface. It doesn't have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember.

How do we remember to remember? That's a question I've asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon. You have to establish the horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic. Or so I’ve come to believe.

Imagine a little girl, hardly more than a baby. She fell from a carriage almost ninety years ago, struck her head on a stone, and forgot everything. Not just her name; everything! And then one day she recalled just enough to pick up a pencil and make that first hesitant mark across the white. A horizon-line, sure. But also a slot for blackness to pour through.

Still, imagine that small hand lifting the pencil ... hesitating ... and then marking the white. Imagine the courage of that first effort to re-establish the world by picturing it. I will always love that little girl, in spite of all she has cost me. I must. I have no choice. Pictures are magic, as you know.

On the one hand, this is my favorite prose passage in the book. On the other hand, the entire book has that same atmosphere and themes: the magic of art, the bleakness of loss, the terror of opening a door into darkness, human empathy and connections, and, always, how making a mark on paper is both simple and difficult, the dividing line between nothing and everything.

Unusually for Stephen King, Duma Key is set in on the Florida coast – an incredibly vivid and atmospheric Florida, which becomes enough of a character in its own right to make the book a very satisfying sea-soaked, sunset-lit Gothic.

I am pleased to say that this is one of the least gross King books I’ve read, bar a rotting ghost or two. It’s also one of the scariest, in a very classic “terrify by keeping the scary stuff mostly off-page” manner. The Big Bad is never quite seen directly, and is one of King’s creepiest and most mythically archetypal figures.

It’s also one of King’s most heartbreaking books. Almost all the characters are really likable, and if not likable, than still very human. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon opens with, The world had teeth and it could bite you with them any time it wanted. Duma Key is about the beauty and magic and redemption of the world, but also about the teeth.

It begins with a wealthy self-made man, Edgar Freemantle, getting into an absolutely horrific accident while visiting one of his job sites. He loses an arm and gets some brain damage; he’s barely out of the hospital before his marriage has ended, his life as he knew it has ended, and he’s on the brink of suicide.

After some talks with his psychiatrist, he ends up taking up art, which he’d enjoyed as a boy but never pursued, and moving to a cabin in the Florida Keys. There he meets a chatty guy, Wireman, who’s the caretaker for Elizabeth, an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s – both of whom have pasts which slowly, heartbreakingly unfold over the course of the book. Edgar finds that painting is his new passion and genuine talent… but his paintings are odd. Eerie. And they can change things…

The first half of the book follows Edgar as he recovers from his accidents, explores his new talent and gains critical and commercial success, and loses some old friends and gains some new ones. The emotional and physical recovery from the accident and its fallout (which doesn't mean he'll ever be the same as he was before) was incredibly well-done and vivid. I don't know if it was technically correct, but it felt very believable.

In classic Gothic fashion, there’s creepy stuff going on simultaneously, but it’s comparatively subtle. I found this part of the book hugely enjoyable even though tons of scenes are just Edgar painting or eating sandwiches and shooting the breeze with Wireman. On the one hand, it probably could have been shorter. On the other hand, I could have happily gone on reading just that part forever.

And then the creepy stuff gets less subtle. A lot less subtle.

This has an unusual story arc. I’m putting that and other huge spoilers behind a cut, but I’ll also mention that even for King, the book has some very tragic aspects— ones which he’s explored before, but there’s one I’ll rot13.com (feed into the site to reveal) because it’s a specific thing that people may want to avoid. Gur cebgntbavfg’f qnhtugre vf xvyyrq. Fur’f na nqhyg ohg n lbhat bar (n pbyyrtr fghqrag) naq irel yvxnoyr, naq vg’f gur ovttrfg bs frireny thg-chapurf va gur fgbel. Nyfb, n qbt vf uvg ol n pne naq qvrf.

If that’s not a dealbreaker, I suggest not reading the rest of the spoilers because even though if I’d sat down and tried to figure out where the story was going, I probably could have, the experience of reading it feels unpredictable; you can guess the outlines but a lot of the details are unexpected.

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While King has written better climaxes, the actual ending is one of his best.

Who else has read this? Want to discuss?

Duma Key

Completely forgot to review this when I finished it, can now barely remember it. Moderately entertaining but uninspired Gothic in which the heroine spends 90% of the book sorting papers in a spooky attic and searching for her perennially missing dog, with occasional interludes in which someone whomps her over the head, shoots at her, or ties her up.

The concluding explanation of what the hell was going on is less amusingly deranged than one might hope from Holland (author of the deliciously wacky Trelawny, in which twin brothers impersonate each other until she didn't know which was which), but did manage to bring in multiple villains, an exploding car, international intrigue, a completely pasted-on-yay romance, and surprise!secret Israeli agents valiantly uncovering an incomprehensible plot by anti-Semites. Why this was all going on at a lonely British house and involved the heroine and her dog, only Holland knew.

Two Gothics!

The Wizard's Daughter is, I think, the only one of hers which isn’t in first person. It’s in omniscient, with a narrator who wryly comments on the heroine Marianne’s naivete, speculates on what Freud might have to say about Marianne’s dreams of her father, and mentions that no one yet knew the concept of allergies. More than any of Michaels’ Gothics but Someone in the House, it’s almost a Gothic parody.

When innocent and extravagantly beautiful (silver-gilt curls) Marianne is left penniless after her father’s death, she gets caught up in evil nightclubs, séances, and questions about her parentage. She ends up trying to call up her father’s ghost in a house inhabited by assorted peculiar characters, from an insane gardener who lurks in closets to an aunt with hundreds of cats. It’s very funny, down to the explanation of Marianne’s psychic trances and the revelation of the true fate of her father.

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The Master of Blacktower, one of Michaels’ earlier novels, starts out more seriously, with Damaris (red-gold curls,) also orphaned after her father’s death, taking a position as secretary to the Master of Blacktower in rural Scotland, where servants and peasants make dire warnings in phonetic dialect. The Master has a scarred face and black silk gloves which he never takes off. At one point Damaris is shoved off a turret, caught, then dropped. To prove that he wasn’t the one who caught and dropped her, the Master inquires whether the person who grabbed her had all his or her fingers, then whips off his gloves, revealing that he’s missing several fingers and the glove fingers are stuffed with cotton!

Sadly, this is not supposed to be hilarious (I think) though as coraa pointed out you’d think that Damaris would have noticed before that only some of his fingers ever moved. Then there’s a rather random duel, people thought to be dead return, and several characters fall to their deaths in the Very Same Pool that killed the Master’s first wife. It’s ridiculous but not really played for laughs, which in this case makes it less funny than The Wizard’s Daughter.