Gothic – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 ALENA by Rachel Pastan /2014/alena-by-rachel-pastan/ Thu, 06 Mar 2014 12:45:58 +0000 /?p=25739 Book Quote:

“I guess you’re wondering why I’m telling you this.”

I shook my head. I knew why, even then, young as I was and afraid of her. I knew she was telling me because she had to tell me, showing me because she had to show someone. This room was her work as much as it was Alena’s. Alena might have made the room, but Agnes had conserved it—exhaustively, painstakingly—with all the care, patience, attention, exertion at her disposal. It was a task literally without end. Did the room exist if no one saw it? And if it didn’t exist, did Agnes?

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAR 6, 2014)

Alena is a novel about the art world and the people who inhabit it. It is said to be an homage to du Maurier’s Rebecca. However, not having read Rebecca in no way took anything away from my love of this novel. This novel stands on its own and I loved it.

The novel gets its name from the first curator of The Nauk, a private museum on the Cape in Massachusetts. For fifteen years, Alena held this position and gained a reputation of being bigger than life. She was headstrong, other-worldly, manipulative, dark, flirtatious, and intently involved in conceptual art, especially art that related to the human body. As time progressed her tastes became darker, leaning more and more towards the bloody, death-glorifying, and often gross renderings of the physical. As the novel opens, Alena has disappeared. She has been gone for two years and is presumed dead though her body has never been found. The prevailing belief is that she drowned by taking a swim in the ocean when the currents were too strong for her.

Bernard Augustin, Chair of the Board of the Nauk, goes to the Venice Biennale as he does every year. He is a well-known collector and figure in the art world. In Venice he hobnobs with the top tier art dealers, gallery owners and collectors. It is in Venice that he meets a young female curator from the midwest who is there with her controlling boss on her first visit abroad. (Interestingly, the name of this young curator is never provided in the book.) She meets Bernard by chance and is in awe of him and a bit in love as well despite the fact that he is gay. They hit it off intellectually and emotionally and on an impulse, Bernard offers her the position of curator at The Nauk. She accepts, not actually knowing what she is getting in to.

Once at the museum, the young curator is met with a staff that is still loyal to Alena and resentful of someone taking her place. Alena had promised the next show to a conceptual artist, a Gulf War veteran and multiple amputee who displays scenes of war with body parts and lots of blood. She, however, wants to decide on her own what the next show will be and she offers it to a ceramic artist who makes porcelain butterflies. The Nauk hasn’t had a show in two years and Bernard tells her that the show must be up in two months, by Labor Day. There is a lot of angst between the employees and the curator, and between the curator and the ceramist.

The ambiance of the novel is gothic and eerie. There are a lot of strange characters and happenings that serve to upset and off put the curator each time she attempts to accomplish something. Bernard is not there most of the time to ease the way in for her as he travels to his homes in New York, Colorado and Europe or else he’s attending art-related business far away.

The information about art is comprehensive. The author, Rachel Pastan, knows her conceptual art very well and her knowledge of art history is impressive. This book hooked me right away and I could not put it down. I resented anything that got in the way of my reading it; it was that good. So I present to you this review from a reader who has not read Rebecca but loves this novel as it stands on its own with no history or homage to any other piece of literature but solely to art.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 26 readers
PUBLISHER: Riverhead Hardcover (January 23, 2014)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Rachel Pastan
EXTRAS: Excerpt and another Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Another to try:

 

Bibliography:

 

]]> THE SLEEP ROOM by F. R. Tallis /2013/the-sleep-room-by-f-r-tallis/ Sun, 15 Dec 2013 20:00:12 +0000 /?p=23611 Book Quote:

“Physical pain, no matter how bad, was never the equal of mental pain.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (DEC 15, 2013)

The Sleep Room, by F. R. Tallis, is set in England in the 1950s. Dr. James Richardson is offered an opportunity to work with Hugh Maitland, a well-known scholar and “the most influential psychiatrist of his generation.” After he is hired, James travels to Wyldehope Hall, in rural Suffolk, a hospital with twenty-four beds and a narcosis room. Severely disturbed patients are given drugs to induce sleep for twenty-one hours a day. Nurses monitor the patients’ vital signs and rouse them at regular intervals for meals, bathing, and sessions of electroconvulsive therapy. James observes that the sleep room is run like a “factory production line;” the patients, who wear white gowns, resemble “compliant ghosts.”

Most of the story is narrated by Richardson, an insecure and intense young man who interacts with nurses and the occasional doctor, but spends much of his time alone or with his sleeping patients. It is unsurprising that his imagination soon starts playing tricks on him. He has upsetting dreams, hears strange noises, and notices that objects are disappearing or disturbed. Is there a supernatural explanation for these peculiar phenomena? We sympathize with the increasingly anxious Richardson as he grows ever more uncertain about the efficacy of narcosis and the wisdom of his remaining at Wyldehope. Fortunately, James finds much-needed solace in the arms of Jane Turner, a lovely nurse to whom he is deeply attracted.

Frank Tallis is a talented writer — his Max Liebermann series of historical mysteries is outstanding — who foreshadows the spine-chilling events to come by creating a creepy and sinister mood and setting his novel in a remote and forbidding locale. Tallis, an experienced clinical psychologist and an expert in the history of his field, educates us about bizarre and frightening treatments that were once routinely administered by respected medical practitioners. The conclusion is sure to generate controversy. Some will pronounce it clever; others (myself included) may find it gimmicky and contrived. Nevertheless, The Sleep Room is a compelling exploration of the nature of reality, the fragility of the human mind, and the arrogance of power-hungry physicians who cruelly exploit the men and women in their care.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-0from 7 readers
PUBLISHER: Pegasus (October 1, 2013)
REVIEWER: Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Frank Tallis
EXTRAS: Writing The Sleep Room
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

The Liebermann Papers:

Writing as F. R. Tallis

Nonfiction:

]]> THE WHITE DEVIL by Justin Evans /2011/the-white-devil-by-justin-evans/ Sat, 01 Oct 2011 14:05:38 +0000 /?p=21233 The White Devil, his latest thriller/horror novel that sheds light on the bullying and other nastiness that can go on at boarding schools past and present.]]> Book Quote:

“The eye sockets were sunken; the eyes protruded, a vivid blue; his flesh was a morbid gray. Long blond hair—almost white, albino-looking—hung over his eyes. Once he was forced to break from his labor to cough—and Andrew recognized the noise that had drawn him. The cough combined the bark of a sick animal with a wet, slapping sound. The skeletal man drew his hand across his mouth. Then he looked up. He locked eyes with Andrew.”

Book Review:

Review by Katherine Petersen  (OCT 1, 2011)

Kicked out of his last American boarding school for drugs, Andrew Taylor’s father has sent him to England’s Harrow Academy to redo his senior year. It’s his last chance, and Andrew tries hard to follow the rules and not bring attention to himself. But author Justin Evans has other plans for Andrew in The White Devil, his latest thriller/horror novel that sheds light on the bullying and other nastiness that can go on at boarding schools past and present.

Andrew witnesses the murder of his friend, Theo, on a path near the school’s graveyard, but he can’t give all the details to the police. No one would ever believe that a ghost, for that is all Andrew can come up with for an explanation of the albino-type figure that killed his friend and then vanished.

Rumors abound of the Lot Ghost, a ghost that haunts the house-turned-dorm in which Andrew lives. But there’s much more to this mystery that’s gradually revealed. Andrew bears a strong resemblance to Byron and is cast as the lead in the school play about the Harrow alumnus, written and directed by Piers Fawkes, a poet and master at Lot. Andrew’s other confidante and love interest is Persephone, the only girl at Harrow, the daughter of the school’s headmaster. What Andrew can piece together is that his friends’ lives are in danger, and if he can’t find out the mystery with Lord Byron at its center, he may die as well.

Life at Harrow lies at the center of Evans’s tale. He combines the bullying and torrid relationships of the past with the goings-on in the present, moving easily between the two. Our hero, Andrew, with his resemblance to Byron, links the two eras together. There’s a chance he can solve the mystery of who the ghost is and why people are dying with the help of Fawkes, Persephone and a library researcher, but time may run out on him.

My only pet peeve with this book is that the author tries to do too much. Add in Fawkes problem with alcohol, a speech Andrew has planned for speech day and some of the story threads get dropped without becoming fully developed. That said, Evans does a nice job of pulling the reader into the story and maintaining enough tension and hints to keep one’s focus.

I have a penchant for books with boarding schools at their center as well as those with historical settings in part or in whole, so I enjoyed the story immensely. Part horror and part thriller, there are enough creepy, very realistic moments in the story to give out shivers. Evans has a talent for vivid descriptions too, and some weren’t so pretty. While I don’t think the novel has any profound messages to pass along, fans of historical settings, Lord Byron or boarding schools should give it a whirl. Just don’t turn out the lights if it’s late.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 44 readers
PUBLISHER: Harper (May 10, 2011)
REVIEWER: Katherine Petersen
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Justin Evans
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

]]> THE GLASS DEMON by Helen Grant /2011/the-glass-demon-by-helen-grant/ Sat, 27 Aug 2011 14:53:57 +0000 /?p=19537 Book Quote:

“I didn’t believe in demons; I ranked them with ghosts and vampires and werewolves, as products of a fevered imagination, or phenomena with a perfectly rational explanation. I did not realize yet, that summer when I was seventeen and my sister Polly was still alive, when the sun was shining and even the wind was warm and my whole body was restless, that there are worse things than being stuck in a small town for a year.  There are demons, and they are more terrible than we can imagine.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (AUG 27, 2011)

The narrator’s father, Dr. Oliver Fox, a professor seeking fame and fortune, provides the catalyst for the eerie and violent events of Linden’s second (after The Vanishing of Katharina Linden) novel, a finely crafted literary tale of psychological terror.

But it’s the narrator herself, his 17-year-old daughter Lin, who finds herself at the center of it all, trying to control events that threaten to tear her family apart, events that are far beyond her understanding, much less her ability to manipulate. Indeed, her attempts to take matters into her own impatient hands make things worse.

From the first page, we know people will die, including Lin’s sister Polly.

“If anyone were to ask me, ‘What is the root of all evil?’ I would say not ‘Money,’ but ‘Food.’ It was food – specifically the lack of it – that killed my sister, or at least assisted at the death. And the old man that day in the orchard in Niederburgheim was the only person I have ever seen who died of eating an apple.”

Grant opens the novel with the Fox family – Oliver, his wife Tuesday, Lin, Polly and baby brother Reuben – nearly at the end of their road trip from their home in England to a small rural town in Germany.

A local historian has invited Oliver to come and research the famous, exquisite Allerheiligen stained glass, medieval masterpieces which have been lost to the world for more than 200 years and may well have been destroyed. They are also, legend has it, haunted, by the demon Bonchariant.

Lost, they pull to the side of the road to ask directions, but the man who appears to be sleeping in an apple orchard is actually dead (probably having fallen off his ladder), an apple with one bite taken beside him, the ground oddly littered with glass sparkling in the sunlight.

Oliver, unwilling to get involved, drives on, leaving the body for someone else to discover. Eventually they find the crumbling castle they have rented so Oliver can conduct his research from a suitably atmospheric base. These priceless windows will make Oliver’s reputation if he can only find them, but to begin with he is unable even to find the local man who invited him to come.

Eventually he tracks down the man’s address but Herr Heinrich Mahlberg no longer lives there. He has recently died, having suffered an accident in his bath. The other locals are not nearly as welcoming as Herr Mahlberg promised to be. One local historian offers to share his notes – handwritten in German – but assures Oliver he is wasting his time as the windows were destroyed by the French in the 19th century, the letter describing the destruction itself destroyed in the last war’s bombings.

Meanwhile Lin (who speaks fluent German) has started school and been thrown together with the boy next door – or, in this case, the boy on an uninviting farm the other side of the spooky woods. Michel drives her to school each morning, his crush painfully obvious, and unrequited.

Threats against the family mount as their isolation increases. Inexplicable events – all involving broken bits of glass – begin to loom larger as the family feels itself hounded by superstition or, as Lin begins to think, by the Bonchariant demon who inhabits the famous glass.

Mostly unable to speak the language and shunned by the locals, the atmosphere thickens around the isolated Fox family, while Lin finds herself becoming more deeply swept up in the ancient myths surrounding the glass.

Grant uses a winning combination of psychological tension and local folkloric atmosphere to advance her tale, building suspense and dread as she goes, much as she did in her first novel.

There is one problem however, which may not bother the YA audience the story is at least partly aimed at. Lin is a sulky teenager and for me at least, this grows tiresome. She’s always complaining about mess and other peoples’ self-centeredness but never lifts a finger to help with all the chores that don’t get done, or get left to her anorexic sister, Polly.

However, Grant delivers a smashing conclusion and by the end of the book most readers will have forgiven Lin her teen brattiness.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 4 readers
PUBLISHER: Bantam; Original edition (June 14, 2011)
REVIEWER: Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Helen Grant
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

]]> YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUESTED AT SUVANTO by Maile Chapman /2011/your-presence-is-requested-at-suvanto-by-maile-chapman/ Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:21:20 +0000 /?p=19208 Book Quote:

“We’re nearly ready, we’re always almost ready and it takes only a little time for the vessels to flush and fill with memory, and then we can open our eyes, lift our heads, sit up in our beds, and turn to meet your gaze. We’ll tell you what we remember.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (JUL 15, 2011)

Nestled in the pristine Finnish woods is a sanatorium for women. It’s the 1920s and medicine and its accompanying attitudes towards women’s health is moving from Victorian ideas to more modern methods of treatment, but those shifts have not yet reached the women’s hospital at Suvanto. This vast multistoried building is still part spa for the wealthy wives of the male employees for the local timber company, and part hospital for the poor. This is a building with sharp physical and mental divisions between staff and patients and also between the patients themselves. The poor patients–those who are considered “really” ill are kept on the bottom floors, while the convalescing wives of the timber employees, called the “up-patients” lodge on the 5th floor.

American nurse, Sunny Taylor, arrives at Suvanto hoping to leave the memories of her mother’s protracted illness behind. Upon arrival, she’s assigned to administer to the up-patients on the top floor. Most of these women are not seriously ill–although they may suffer from a number of hysterical illnesses, age-related problems or perhaps just ennui–the result of the delicate, protected and largely synthetic lives they lead. Into this stifling atmosphere of hospital pajamas, organized games and medications, arrives Julia Dey, a former tango teacher dumped on the hospital by her husband.
There are hints that Julia may suffer from some sort of venereal disease, but she also suffers–as many middle-aged women do at Suvanto–from a “woman’s ailment.” In Julia’s case, she suffers from a prolapsed uterus. Sunny begins to find that she identifies with the patients rather than the rest of the nursing staff, and she’s particularly sympathetic to Julia.

Unlike Julia, who had no say in the fact she was sent to Suvanto, some of the women have chosen to stay at Suvanto and welcome the time as a break from their husbands. Indeed, some of the wealthy wives are regulars who return each year. These wives lead protected, hothouse lives, so Julia is a totally different being. For one thing she’s worked for a living and she’s led an exotic life. She’s also not an easy patient, and Julia’s refusal to cooperate causes the latent cruelty of the nurses to surface. Pearl Weber, one of the more popular women, is considered by her frustrated husband to be suffering from neurosis and actively making herself ill. The perfumed, powdered and cosseted Pearl becomes Julia’s unlikely friend.

Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto is an incredibly creepy, disturbing novel, and throughout the story there’s a sense of malevolence and gathering menace. The hospital’s stagnant atmosphere shifts with the arrival of a male doctor who’s experimenting with some new surgical techniques, and the building is detailed in such a way that it becomes a vivid part of this story. The hospital exudes a sterility in which death, depression and hopelessness linger. Its intricate architecture includes soundproofing, passages and locked rooms–all things that echo the ideas of secrecy, separation and impenetrability. Yet oddly, most of the up-patients look forward to their rest at Suvanto. What does that say about their everyday lives?

Author Chapman cleverly allows the narrative to shift from third-person to first person plural, and this technique underscores the idea that while the hospital operates on a bland day-to-day-level, there’s an underlying culture between the female patients that’s largely impenetrable by the staff:

“We cared only for ourselves. We had large windows, and we watched the sky thicken with snow. We pulled open the metal door to the roof and positioned ourselves along the curving promenade, scraping our lounge chairs over the concrete, turning to absorb the winter sunlight through fur-lined hats and soft, generous coats. From the promenade you can see the cornerstone; we discovered this by carefully leaning out over the railing, into the air, looking down to where the building meets the ground. Pictures were taken, and we’d like to see them now, because we were beautiful then. We’d like to be beautiful again, and in memory we will be, and then we’ll tell you all about that winter, including the early deaths, some say preventable, some say one, some say three, that happened at Suvanto. We’re nearly ready, we’re always almost ready and it takes only a little time for the vessels to flush and fill with memory, and then we can open our eyes, lift our heads, sit up in our beds, and turn to meet your gaze. We’ll tell you what we remember.”

There’s a quote at the beginning of the book from The Bacchae, and it’s a quote that fits both the novel’s action and the relationships between the up-patients–women who are largely kept like expensive pets by their husbands, and when these women begin to suffer mentally from the shallowness of their caged lives, they’re shipped off to Suvanto for repair. The women may appear to be docile dolls with expensive habits, but there’s a rage and violence lurking beneath the text that Chapman captures perfectly. The hospital is a strictly hierarchal institution, and yet the up-patients operate, eventually, outside of that hierarchy as they challenge and then destroy it. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto is primarily a women’s novel for its exploration of women’s health (real and imagined) and that includes a number of female-specific issues and its strong feminist subtext.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-0from 16 readers
PUBLISHER: Graywolf Press (May 24, 2011)
REVIEWER: Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Maile Chapman
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of: 

The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett

Bibliography:

 

]]> THE WINTER GHOSTS by Kate Mosse /2011/the-winter-ghosts-by-kate-mosse/ Sun, 10 Jul 2011 11:44:30 +0000 /?p=19200 Book Quote:

” ‘I am Fabrissa.’ ”

That was it, that was all she said. But it was enough. Already her voice was familiar to me, beloved.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (JUL 10, 2011)

Mosse gives her beguiling novel an old fashioned gothic framework that suits this eerie story of ghostly love in an insular mountain village of France a decade after WWI. The story opens in 1933 as Frederick Watson visits an antiquarian bookseller in Toulouse. “He walked like a man recently returned to the world. Every step was careful, deliberate. Every step to be relished.” Well-dressed and confident, Watson knows his appearance contrasts sharply with his last visit to Toulouse in 1928 at age 25. “He had been another man then, a tattered man, worn threadbare by grief.”

He hands the bookseller a parchment document to translate, which, the man tells him, dates from medieval days and is written in the local language of the time. The bookseller asks how Watson came to possess the parchment and Watson tells him the story of his strange visit to the Pyrenees in 1928. This first-person narrative forms the bulk of the novel.

For a decade Watson had been consumed by sorrow for his elder brother, George, killed in the war when the younger boy was in his teens. His parents and his friends have lost patience with him. His father is ashamed of him for his lack of backbone; his mother was never much interested in him in the first place. George had been the center of the family. “It was his presence that had made us a family, the glue. Without him we were three strangers with nothing to say.”

The French motor tour, prescribed by his doctor, has taken him into the foothills of the Pyrenees. One tormented night he steps to the edge of a cliff, then steps back. “Was it courage or cowardice that stopped me? Still I cannot say. Even now, I find it hard to tell those imposters one from the other.” The moment marks the beginning of his recovery. He joins a convivial tavern crowd that evening in toasting the new prosperity of their town and begins to understand the human need to move forward.

Still as his journey into the mountains continues, his mood swings; the landscape grows more alien and menacing, the sky more threatening. His aloneness is tangible and then a voice – singing, whispering – sounds plaintively. Watson goes on, but is soon caught in a sudden violent blizzard. His car goes off the road, narrowly avoiding a mortal plunge into a ravine, and he is left to find his way down the mountain to the nearest village.

Which he does, coming to rest at a charming little inn, where he is invited by the innkeeper to a village fete taking place that very night.

And from here the narration becomes deliciously unreliable as Watson makes his solitary way to the fete through narrow and deserted village streets, getting hopelessly lost in the silent night before torchlight and voices guide him to a hall where he’s swept up in a friendly whirl of villagers dressed in medieval clothing, seated at long tables, eating from trenchers.

His own dinner companion is a girl whose beauty is exceeded only by her instinctive understanding. Watson finds himself falling in love with a woman who seems to know him better than he knows himself. But their evening is not destined for a fairytale ending. Not the happy-ever-after kind anyway.

Mosse’s writing is wonderfully spooky as she explores the emotional resonance of grief, loneliness and an unwillingness to let go and move on (why, for instance, are people impatient with this lingering grief?) meld with the redeeming power of love and the repeating cycles of man’s brutality to man, i.e. war and atrocity.

The novel’s form is comfortingly familiar – did Watson hit his head in the accident or fall prey to a fever as the modern villagers believe, or was his emotional state particularly attuned to the unresolved tragedy that remained hidden in the hills?

Poignant and eerie, and steeped in French country atmosphere, this is a novel that should appeal to fans of literary ghost stories.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-0from 28 readers
PUBLISHER: Putnam Adult (February 3, 2011)
REVIEWER: Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Kate Mosse
EXTRAS: Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Languedoc Trilogy:

]]> WITCHES ON THE ROAD TONIGHT by Sheri Holman /2011/witches-on-the-road-tonight-by-sheri-holman/ Thu, 03 Mar 2011 14:22:53 +0000 /?p=16526 Book Quote:

“… What happened? He thinks, and marvels that he can recall human speech. With great effort, Tucker draws himself onto his hands and knees and crawls down the breezeway to her shut bedroom door. He puts his eye against her keyhole.

There, Cora Alley, freshly dismounted, is wriggling back into the soft folds of empty arms and legs; she, too, returning to her human skin.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (MAR 3, 2011)

Witches on the Road Tonight by Sheri Holman is a tale of intergenerational witches that takes place in four different time frames between the 1930’s and the present. The plot moves back and forth between generations and characters. This requires a bit of concentration, but is well worth the effort. It has something of the fears that rise from ghost stories told around a campfire.

The novel begins with Eddie lying down prepared to die. He is in the casket he inherited from his mother, Cora Alley. Eddie has cancer and has taken an overdose of pills. He has left a message for his daughter, Wallis, to call him. For twenty years Eddie was Captain Casket, campy horror show host, and this is the casket from which he would rise during his TV show.

When Eddie was young, a couple came through his home community of Panther Gap in Appalachia to document rural life for the WPA. The two are Tucker, a writer and Sophie, a photographer. Tucker injures Eddie when Eddie runs without warning in front of the car. Tucker and Sophie take the injured Eddie home to recover, but no one is there when they arrive. While waiting for Eddie’s mother, Cora, to come home Tucker shows Eddie an antique horror movie. Just then Cora comes home from a day collecting ginseng roots. Cora’s impact on Tucker is profound.

Cora is a mountain witch, someone who crawls out of her skin at night and then rides men like they were horses. She rides them to exhaustion. If she fancies a man, she will ride him over and over until he is not much good to anyone else; not his wife; not his employer. Cora rides Tucker on successive nights. He is sexually stimulated, humiliated and completely exhausted. He asks Eddie how to avoid being kept in a witch’s power. Eddie tells Tucker never to loan anything to a witch or you are hers forever, but Tucker loans the movie to Cora. The next thing we see is Tucker running through the woods shedding clothing as some creature, we presume the panther of Panther Gap, devours him.

Wallis is Eddie’s daughter, the granddaughter of Cora and is also a witch. Like Cora, she harnesses a powerful sexual appetite. Near the end of Eddie’s career as Captain Casket and when Wallis was on the verge of adolescence, Eddie and his wife take in Jasper, a homeless young man. Jasper has been hanging around the TV station where Eddie works, and Eddie has become fond of the young man. Jasper’s intrusion into the family is a burden to twelve-year-old Wallis. She is constantly provoked by Jasper for whom she develops a powerful sexual attraction. The day after Eddie’s twenty-year reign as a horror show host is over, Eddie, Jasper and Wallis leave town and travel to Panther Gap to Cora’s home in the mountains. While they are there the ghost-story atmosphere intensifies. Jasper, Wallis and Eddie find the remnants of Tucker’s clothing confirming the tale Eddie told Jasper of Cora’s role in Tucker’s disappearance.

Wallis is currently an anchorwoman. The dying Eddie left her a phone message while she was on the air. You get the sense that Wallis is annoyed with Eddie. In the afterglow of her show she has not checked her messages, going instead, as she does regularly, to have a sexual fling with Jeff, one of the crew. Jeff’s come-on to Wallis is the revelation that the Jeff was a card-carrying fan of Captain Casket. Wallis has her fling and then tries to get a ride home, but it is late and the car doesn’t come. Dogs howl in the night and she is afraid. She remembers what happened at Panther Gap and what happened to Jasper in the aftermath. Then she listens to Eddie’s phone massage, a slurred reference to going on a ginseng hunt, their code for an adventure. Jasper, too, went on a ginseng hunt; so did Tucker. Wallis screams and Jeff takes her back into his apartment to comfort her. She feels compelled to tell the ghost story about the visit to Panther Gap by Wallis, Eddie and Jasper.

Being witches, Wallis and Cora bend men to their wills often to tragic ends. Witchcraft can be seen in light of the war between the sexes. A witch is the embodiment of women’s powers and their sexuality. For men, a witch is to be feared and desired. For women such as Wallis, a witch is what you become when the power of your magical thinking comes to pass. In some ways Witches on the Road Tonight reinforces a masculine objectification of powerful women as witches. The female protagonists are all powerful women; they all manipulate their men.

I really enjoyed the book and recommend it highly. It is an extremely well-written and pleasantly complex adult ghost story.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 6 readers
PUBLISHER: Atlantic Monthly Press (March 1, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Sheri Holman
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More mountain magic:

Bloodroot by Amy Green

Bibliography:

For Kids:

]]> INSTRUMENTS OF DARKNESS by Imogen Robertson /2011/instruments-of-darkness-by-imogen-robertson/ Mon, 28 Feb 2011 03:06:43 +0000 /?p=16205 Book Quote:

“Should you need me in years to come, you will find a way to discover me, I am sure.   There are ties that bind us together, bonds of blood beyond titles and land.  If you cannot free yourself, call for me, and I shall come to you in one way or another.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (FEB 27, 2011)

Imogen Robertson’s Instruments of Darkness is set in the village of Hartswood, West Sussex, at a time when the colonies were waging war against England. The male protagonist, the brusque Gabriel Crowther, is an eccentric and a recluse who has a wide-ranging knowledge of and interest in human anatomy. One day, a local woman, Mrs. Harriet Westerman of Caveley Park, pays him a visit and insists that his maid give him the following note: “I have found a body on my land. His throat has been cut.”

Robertson then shifts to Tichfield Street near Soho Square in London. Residing there are a music store proprietor, Alexander Adams, and his two children, the precocious Susan, who is nine, and Jonathan, six. Alexander is a widower who has cut off contact with his birth family for reasons that will later become clear. He ruefully states “that the past must be looked at squarely or it will chase you down,” but he fails to follow this sound advice. Fortunately, Adams has the support of close friends, including a young writer, Mr. Graves, and Mr. and Mrs. Chase, whose single daughter has caught Graves’s eye.

How do all these characters fit together? Readers will need a great deal of patience while the author presents us with an elaborate jigsaw puzzle and then painstakingly fits the pieces together. Although Crowther and Harriet are not romantically involved (she is happily married to a commodore who is at sea, and they have two small children), the two become a sort of Sherlock Holmes and Watson. They put their heads together in an effort to: 1. Learn the identity of the dead man 2. Find out who killed him and why 3. Discover what connection, if any, there is between the victim and the people living in Thornleigh Hall. They include the older Lord Thornleigh, the Earl of Sussex, who is ailing; his low-class young wife; Captain Hugh Thornleigh, who fought against the colonists and came back maimed; and Hugh’s steward, the unpleasant Wicksteed. Harriet insists “There is something wrong in that house. Something wounded and rotten. I am sure of it.”

Instrument of Darkness is reminiscent of Anne Perry’s books, in that it examines the rot that destroys titled and wealthy families from within when they are morally bankrupt. The mystery is not difficult to solve once the clues are laid out, but the villains prove to be so utterly evil that they cease to be realistic. Robertson goes back and forth in time and shifts locales frequently, which can be rather dizzying. In addition, Crowther and Harriet are an odd couple. He is reticent; she is voluble. He is a man of science and reflection. She is a woman of action. For their own reasons, they go out of their way to learn the truth (with a bit of help from Harriet’s eighteen-year-old sister, Miss Rachel Trench), which eventually emerges in all of its sordid details. The conclusion is over the top, and the body count rises alarmingly before the dust finally settles.

To her credit, the author has a good sense of time and place, and her dialogue and prose style are pleasantly fluent. She demonstrates how the redcoats underestimated the American farmers who passionately took up arms against them. In addition, she explores the ways in which the skeletons in one’s closet can destroy relationships. The characters of Susan, her father, and Graves, are particularly appealing and their story is poignant. Finally, Robertson shows how imperfect the criminal justice system was in those days. If Crowther and Harriet had not intervened, no one would have ever learned who the guilty parties really were. Although this is not a top-tier novel—it is a bit too long and has too many subplots, including one about the bitter conflict between Protestants and Catholics—Instruments of Darkness will be of interest to readers who enjoy forensics and historical fiction with gothic overtones.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 3 readers
PUBLISHER: Pamela Dorman Books (February 17, 2011)
REVIEWER: Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Imogen Robertson
EXTRAS: Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More 18th century detective work:

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]]> THE CYPRESS HOUSE by Michael Koryta /2011/the-cypress-house-by-michael-koryta/ Mon, 24 Jan 2011 15:54:49 +0000 /?p=15633 Book Quote:

“This was a dangerous game. Wasn’t as simple as talking. There was more to it than that, and what Tolliver had said had been the truth – the dead weren’t required to help him.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (JAN 24, 2011)

In Koryta’s latest thriller – noir with a twist of the supernatural – it’s late summer 1935 and a group of hard-bitten WWI veterans and one talented 19-year-old are headed for the Florida Keys to build a highway bridge.

“They’d been on the train for five hours before Arlen Wagner saw the first of the dead men.” Wagner, a loner who’s taken the kid, Paul Brickhill, under his wing, developed a chilling battlefield talent during the war. He could look at living men and see death steal over them. “He could see skulls shining in the pale moonlight where faces belonged, hands of white bone clutching rifle stocks.”

He found he could save some too, change the course of their fate. Not all, not even many; but some. So when he looks around and sees that every last man on the train, including young Paul, is about to die, he tries to convince them to get off at the next stop. But it’s the middle of nowhere in backwoods Florida and these hungry men aren’t about to fall for some superstitious claptrap. He and Paul, a budding and natural engineer, are the only ones who stay behind and as they head out into the dark, “the summer night pressed down on them like a pair of strong hands, made each step feel like ten.”

They finally end up at an oddly deserted fishing resort – The Cypress House – presided over by a woman, Rebecca Cady, who could have stepped right out of a James M. Cain novel: “Beautiful, yes. The sort of gorgeous that haunted men, chased them over oceans and never left their minds, not even when they wanted a respite. But was she trustworthy? No. Arlen was sure of that.”

Paul, however, is smitten and even after a punishing run-in with the corrupt local sheriff, he’s determined to stick around and use his skills to make her life easier. His determination only grows after a powerful hurricane takes out the Cypress House generator as well as its boathouse and dock.

“The three of them went out onto the front porch once, with the building offering shelter between them and the wind, and took in the yard. Everything was awash with water, the sea moving all around them, as if they stood aboard a ship rather than a porch.”

This is the 1935 hurricane that destroyed the Florida Keys railroad, killed hundreds and put paid to any notion of building a Keys highway for many years to come. Wagner’s death vision has been fulfilled – all the men who were on the train were killed in the hurricane. And Wagner is becoming increasingly sure that the longer they stay at The Cypress House, the more they tempt the same fate, even as he finds his eyes – and thoughts – lingering longer on Rebecca Cady. The men who run things in this corrupt little backwater make their own law, and their hold over Cady is as absolute as it is mysterious. To save Paul, Wagner has some hard choices ahead.

Koryta keeps his dialog hard-edged. The noir atmosphere drips with steamy Gulf Coast humidity, and crackles with human chemistry. The supernatural element heightens the eerie feel while the story’s foundations go deep into the real hopelessness of the Depression. Sentence by sentence the prose draws the reader into the story but it all sags a bit in the middle. One of the strengths of classic noir is brevity, and that’s just not possible these days. People like their thrillers long and a certain amount of padding is all but inevitable it seems.

Nevertheless, Koryta builds to a tense, violent climax that makes full use of the swampy Florida setting and its backwoods denizens, as well as all of Wagner’s ingenuity and spooky sense.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 75 readers
PUBLISHER: Little, Brown and Company (January 24, 2011)
REVIEWER: Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Michael Koryta
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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]]> THE CASEBOOK OF VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN by Peter Ackroyd /2010/the-casebook-of-victor-frankenstein-by-peter-ackroyd/ Sat, 11 Dec 2010 14:02:21 +0000 /?p=14088 Book Quote:

“I sat quite still and observed the heavens revolving above my head, and wondered if they were the origin of my being. Or had I come from the creeping waters of the river? Or from the mild earth that nurtured all the plants and flowers of the world? When at first light a wood pigeon came before me, I took part in its existence and pecked upon the ground; when a gull flew above my head I shared its soaring form; when I watched an otter upon the bank, I could feel the sleekness of its limbs. In all creatures now I felt the force of one life, a life I shared, of which the principles were energy and joy.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (DEC 11, 2010)

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in 1818, and it stands as a classic marker of the intersection between the Romantic and Industrial Ages. The most superficial aspect of her idea — a being created from human corpses by the use of electricity that turns out to be a monster — has been transformed by Hollywood into a cliché of the horror genre. Yet Mary Shelley’s original work has profound moral and philosophical implications that shed a great deal of light on the thought of the time, and are relevant in many respects to debates in our own age, such as cloning and stem-cell research. Peter Ackroyd’s retelling of the story might seem superfluous, except that for modern readers it manages to cut even closer to the heart of what made the original novel so important, not least in its pitch-perfect evocation of early 19th-century style and intellectual portrait of the age.

What Ackroyd is essentially writing about is the genesis of Frankenstein, and the intellectual climate which gave it birth. The book is presented as the first-person narration of Frankenstein himself, a cultured gentleman from the Mont Blanc region who comes to study at Oxford University and there meets Percy Bysshe Shelley. The two become close friends and Victor later meets many members of the atheist and agnostic circles in which Shelley occasionally moved, his two wives (Harriet Westwood and Mary Woolstonecraft Godwin), and literary personages such as Lord Byron and the shadowy John Polidori, who is credited as the author of the first vampire story. Frankenstein’s studies are originally philosophical, into the origin, nature, and meaning of life, but they soon take a more practical turn as he explores whether the newly-discovered “electrical fluid” might be the source of all energy, and thus be harnessed in the conquest of death.

As Mary Shelley had done, Ackroyd brings Frankenstein and the monster together again for the creature to tell his story. This is a passage of extraordinary beauty, as the opening quotation should show, in which the creature goes through the process of human learning with astonishing rapidity. Like a second Caliban, he looks on life from a perspective largely free from conventions of social and religious morality, but he goes far beyond Caliban in his appreciation of abstract philosophy. The apparent disconnect between the purity of the creature’s mind and the deformity of his body may surprise some readers, but it will become important later.

Ackroyd differs from Shelley in that his Frankenstein only revives a recently-deceased corpse; there is no thought of new creation. His story is more concentrated in space and time, and less melodramatic. He also takes several liberties with history: most of the events concerning real-life people did indeed take place, but Ackroyd freely shifts them around by a year or so here and there, and suggests different circumstances for known events such as the drowning of Shelley’s first wife. But those who are prepared to read the novel as something more than a simple retelling of Mary Shelley’s original or a book of history will find a work of some depth that is entirely true to the essence of its period, besides being a rattling tale of Gothic adventure. And nowhere does Ackroyd depart more significantly from the original than in his astounding but carefully-prepared conclusion — but that would be telling!

As a former art-historian whose specialty was the Romantic period, I take a particular interest in Ackroyd’s insights. In one scene, for example, Frankenstein and the Shelleys are sailing up the Rhine, looking at the “rugged mounts, and crags, and precipices, where castles had been erected among the rocks and torrents.” Bysshe takes the anarchist point of view: “There is tyranny visible. Every stone is fashioned out of blood. It is built upon foundations of suffering.” Mary, however, contradicts him: “The spirit of this place is more friendly than you suppose, Bysshe. It is more intimate with humankind. Do you not see? How much more harmonious than those mountain peaks and abysses you praise so highly! This landscape is touched by the human spirit.” A perfect summation of this particular landscape and its many reflections in the Romantic imagination. And, in the balance of Gothic wildness and the touch of the human spirit, a beautiful symbol of the essence of Ackroyd’s book.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 23 readers
PUBLISHER: Anchor; Reprint edition (September 7, 2010)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
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