There's something so satisfying about finishing a long book, and NOS4A2 is no exception. At just over 700 pages, NOS4A2 drops you into a dark and scary world, where certain objects have powers that tie into the soul, and children disappear forever into a bright and terrifyingly cheerful place called Christmasland...
While reading, I kept thinking that this book reminded me of something and then it hit me, all at once - Stephen King's IT. Like the children of IT, we follow the heroine, Vic, from a young age. We see her first interaction with Charlie Manx and how she is barely able to escape him, but hurts him in the process. We follow her to adulthood and see how the experience shaped and hardened her, and how she struggles to prepare herself for the second dark showdown that she knows, deep down, she might not survive.
I think Joe Hill registered the similarity, too, because it seemed like some Easter Eggs were tossed in there for the fans. As a child, for example, Vic's bike has magical powers, and she chooses it over a Schwinn (the bike that Bill road in IT). Later on, when she has her magical motorcycle, she says HI-YO, SILVER, which was Stuttering Bill's rallying cry, whenever he road his own somewhat magical bike. I don't think this is a coincidence; I choose to believe that this book was Joe Hill paying homage to his dad's legacy.
That isn't to say that this book doesn't stand on its own. Between Christmasland, the Gasmask Man, The House of Sleep, and Charlie Manx, I didn't sleep all that well last night. In fact, I was pretty freaked out. Sometimes horror novels are too over-the-top ridiculous, but this book does a really good job of tapping into those subconscious fears that we all have (just like IT - sorry). It's also creative and original in a way that a lot of horror novels aren't - no werewolves or monsters in here, just a very creepy man and his very creepy henchman, and an army of terrifying little children.
Also, I loved the heroine, and if there was anything I took issue with, it was the fact that Joe Hill pulled a George R.R. Martin with her and basically tortured her every chance he got. So many bad things happened to Vic in this book, and I was hoping that her ending would be much happier than it was (ditto Maggie). There's just something about a tattooed artist with a magical motorcycle, y'know?
If you enjoy horror, and especially if you enjoyed IT, you should read NOS4A2. The graphic novel is pretty good, too. I received an ARC of it from Netgalley, and that was actually what got me interested in reading the book. The artist really does a great job bringing the book to life.
FANTASTICLAND was an unholy amount of fun, in that "I'm going to hell for enjoying this" sort of way. I think the best way to blurb it is by saying that it's like LORD OF THE FLIES, if LORD OF THE FLIES was delivered in a mock-documentary format like WORLD WAR Z - only it's much better than either of those two books. Basically, there's a theme park called "Fantastic Land" that is utterly devastated by a gigantic hurricane called Sadie. Escape from the park is cut off by water, and everything loses power. The employees are marooned there, but with plenty of food and water. Seems like things should be OK, right?
That's what everyone else thinks too, at first. Until the bodies start piling up. The employees separate into "tribes" based on which parts of the park they take over as their command centers, and things start getting pretty brutal, pretty fast. Each interview, with various "survivors" and other people who were either directly or peripherally involved with this horror show, give you more information about what went down, and it is chilling.
I made the mistake of reading this late at night and ended up staying up until midnight on a work night because I wanted to find out what happened next. A lot of people criticized this book, saying it was ridiculous and wasn't realistic, and I think that was a critique of LORD OF THE FLIES, too. Personally, I thought it felt realistic, as people are herd animals who do utterly stupid things in crowds when they think the rest of the group's OK with it (see: Trump voters), and cruelty can sometimes be a more advanced and sociopathic byproduct of cruelty, so I bought it.
I liked that everyone had their own "voice." I liked that everyone tried to rationalize their actions and point the finger at someone else, who was "worse." The public displays of violence for power, the savage coups, and the scavenging and fringe behaviors were really fascinating from a psychological perspective. One of the scariest scenes in this book didn't even have any violence at all - it involved a cat and mouse game in an abandoned hotel and it was something right out of Stephen King.
If you're a fan of J.G. Ballard or Joe Hill, I think you'll really enjoy FANTASTICLAND.
The first time I read this book, I was fourteen. Just a few years older than the kids in IT. I remember it was summer, and as I read about the Losers' Summer of '58 in the Summer of '04, I remember feeling utterly absorbed. I couldn't put the book down and finished it in an entire weekend. I was terrified of using the bathroom at night, half-convinced that a gloved clown hand would come out the back of the tank when I sat down and drag me into the pits of sewer-hell. I gave the shower drain a wide berth. I had a new, respectful fear of balloons and floating.
It was a book that stayed with me over the years.
I tried rereading the book a couple times. but usually ended up giving up around the 900-page mark. This time, with the movie coming out, I told myself I was going to finish. It felt like the perfect time, in a way - I had been a young teenager (almost a preteen) when I started the book. Now, I'm an adult, just a few years younger than the "grown-ups" in this story. And, like the Losers, I returned to face IT a second time, wondering if it would be the way it was when I was a kid.
(Incidentally, the first IT movie was released in 1990, and the 2017 of the reboot is 27 years later. Let that sink in.)
IT is a really great horror story - for the most part, which I'll get to later. The atmosphere, the build-up, the gloomy Gothic vibe of Derry and its apathetic townsfolk: all of these combine to create a pretty menacing environment. And then, of course, there's IT. A killer clown that can also be a leper, a werewolf, or an abuser - whatever you fear the most, except when its Pennywise, leaving balloons like the Joker and his calling cards, and reminding you constantly that down here, everything floats.
The horror aspect is good, but what stuck with me is the coming of age aspect, and the bittersweet nostalgia of childhood when viewed through the lenses of an adult. Most of the story is focused on the relationship between the kids in this book: Mike, Stan, Richie, Eddie, Bill, Beverly, and Ben. Their interactions with each other make this story, and after spending over a thousand pages with these kids, I loved them almost as much as they loved each other - although, more on that, later. It's hard to capture that intensity of the friendship of youth, how quickly it springs, and how eternal it feels... until, one day, it stops, and you find that you can't even remember the last name of the person you would have pledged your undying loyalty to. I had a friend like that, growing up. We were inseparable, and then one day, not. Now I can't remember her last name or even her eye color.
As an adult, what struck me most powerfully this time around was the feeling of nostalgia. I'll be coming up on my ten-year reunion in a few months, and honestly, it freaks me out a little thinking about people who I knew when we were kids being all grown up, some of them with kids of their own now, looking the same but also looking completely different. When the Losers visit Derry as adults and go wandering through some of their old haunts, their wistfulness hit me hard. (And then, of course, sh*t started going down, and nostalgia ceded to "sweet Jesus in a jam jar, get me out of this place").
One thing I love about Stephen King novels is that he really has an ear for how people talk and think. And perhaps one of the most terrifying aspects of Stephen King novels is that, quite often, the real monsters in the book aren't the monsters themselves - but monsters hiding inside human skins. IT features some real doozies in the form of Tom Rogan, Henry Bowers, Mrs. Kaspbrak, and Mr. Marsh. What this means, unfortunately, is that there are some pretty terrible scenes in here involving bigoted slurs, racial violence, physical and sexual abuse, and domestic violence. There are two particularly grim scenes, one homophobic, one anti-black, and both are peppered with slurs and violence. This was upsetting to read, but it does serve to illustrate a point about Derry and the people living in it, and it was always clear to me that the people saying these things were Not Good People. (As for Richie's racist Voice impressions and the constant Jew jokes made at Stan's expense... weeeeeeell...)
So, by this point, you're probably asking yourself why I'm giving it 4-stars instead of 5, since I not only reread the book (which I rarely do), but also enjoyed it in a profound and interesting way. Well, I can give you not one, not two, but three reasons why this book doesn't get 5-stars.
1. Turtles
2. Spiders
3. Gang-bangs
I won't say any more on the matter, because spoilers, but if you've read the book you'll know what I'm talking about. I wasn't thrilled about the deadlights or Chud, either, but those were the main ones.
Here's a picture of my first edition. It was so heavy I damn near gave myself carpal tunnel holding the thing up while trying to read it.
Also, according to this other article I read, people think Pennywise is "hot"? I looked to see if Stephen King had an excellent rejoinder for that one, too, but didn't see one. Perhaps he didn't wish to dignify it with a response. I'm sure there's fanfiction of it, though. That's actually more frightening to me than this book - and considering that I stayed up until 3AM last night, too wound up to sleep after reading some of this terrifying clown nonsense, that says something.
I just read this book called YOU PLAY THE GIRL, a book of essays about pop culture written through a feminist lens, and one of the essays was about Stepford Wives - I seem to recall the author juxtaposed it against the Desperate Housewives and writing a good deal about what it means to be a "housewife," whether you're a good one or a dysfunctional one. I really liked what the author had to say, and it actually motivated me to go dig out my old copy of STEPFORD WIVES for a belated reread.
***WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD***
Disclaimer: I'm a feminist, so obviously I'm a little biased, but in my opinion, STEPFORD WIVES is a feminist book in the same vein as THE HANDMAID'S TALES. STEPFORD is set in the middle of the civil rights era, where Betty Friedan is giving her talks and NOW chapters are rallying for equal rights for women. Men, for the first time, are suddenly expected to share in the housework, and women are being empowered to seek out their own jobs and goals independent of marriage and children, becoming sexually and fiscally autonomous.
One of the biggest issues that women continue to face is objectification. You see this a lot when sexist dudes talk about women, reducing them to their parts ("grab some p*ssy," "Tits or GTFO"), or talking about them as if they are trophies to be won for their accomplishments ("I'm such a nice guy, so why don't I have a girlfriend?"). It's gotten better, but not nearly as much as it should have, and one of the more chilling aspects for me is how modern STEPFORD WIVES feels, despite being published in 1972. I don't know about you, but it doesn't speak very highly towards our society that we're still being plagued by the same exact issues almost fifty years later. Especially since the chilling climax of this book is objectification in the ultimate sense: taking living, breathing women and replacing them with actual objects: in this case, robots.
I've read this book several times over the course of my life, and with every reread I take something new from the text. I feel like I was able to appreciate it more this time because I've been reading more books about history and feminism, so I have a better appreciation for the zeitgeist of the time of this book's publication, and what the broader historical context behind it was. In fact, I would say STEPFORD WIVES actually improves with subsequent reads, because there are all these sinister hints that you pick up on while reading between the lines that make it even more terrifying.
Examples:
When Joanna first finds out about the Men's Association, she is against it. She expects her husband, who claims to be a feminist, will be, too, but he joins because "the only way to change it is from the inside" (6). The irony here is that the only changes being made on "the inside" are occurring within the context of her marriage: Walter sabotages Joanna so slowly that by the time she finally feels the noose tightening, it's already too late.
After one of his Men's Association meetings, Walter comes home late and masturbates furiously in their bed, but acts ashamed when she catches him: His eye-whites looked at her and turned instantly away; all of him turned from her, and the tenting of the blanket at his groin was gone as she saw it, replaced by the shape of his hip (15). They have sex at her insistence, which ends up being "one of their best times ever - for her, at least" and she says, "What did they do...show you dirty movies or something?" (16). This is one of those moments where, in subsequent rereads, the reader wonders: did the members of the Men's Association indoctrinate Walter by showing him what they do to their wives, and did the possibilities of that excite him instead of horrifying him?
Towards the end, after Bobbie, a friend to Walter and Joanna, "changes", Walter hesitates when it's time to say goodbye: Bobbie moved to Walter at the door and offered her cheek. He hesitated - Joanna wondered why - and pecked it (77). I took this to mean that Walter is thinking of his own wife's pending transformation and feeling guilt and uncertainty. Should he go through with it? When Joanna is worried about her friend, Walter has this to say: "There's nothing in the water, there's nothing in the air....They changed for exactly the reasons they told you: because they realized they'd been lazy and negligent. If Bobbie's taking an interest in her appearance, it's about time. It wouldn't hurt YOU to look in a mirror once in a while" (86). He goes on to say: "You're a very pretty woman and you don't do a damn thing with yourself any more unless there's a party or something" (86). That's when I felt like it became too late for Joanna. In the midst of her mental breakdown, she let herself - and the house - go, and Walter decided he didn't want to deal with that, any of it, anymore. Why settle for a flawed woman when you could have a perfect one?
When Joanna tries to run away from the women and the men from the Men's Association corner her, they hunt her down like an animal and mock her fear. I took this to mean that the objectification was complete: they no longer saw her as human - they knew she was about to become a robot, and so to them, she was just a thing. What makes this even more ironic is when they say, "[W]e don't want ROBOTS for wives. We want real women" (114). Because I've heard so many men say similar things - that they want smart, clever, beautiful women...but there's always a qualifier. As long as they don't try too hard, as long as they aren't more successful than me, as long as they aren't shrill or know-it-all.
The Men of Stepford want "real" women...but they also don't want flawed, forgetful women who sometimes let themselves go and don't want to do all the housework. They want the women of their fantasies made real: they want Pygmalion.
"Suppose one of these women you think is a robot - suppose she was to cut herself on the finger, and bleed. Would THAT convince you she was a real person? Or would you say we made robots with blood under the skin?" (114)
The ending of this book is depressing AF. I'm not sure what the message is, exactly, either - is it saying that men are inherently sexist and unwilling to move towards equality? Or is it a warning of the reductio ad absurdum variety of what objectification can lead to if left unchecked? And what of the children: are they going to groom their daughters to become robots when they come of age as well, marrying themselves off to the highest bidder? The story becomes even bleaker if you consider the possibilities. I took it as a warning, and a criticism of the patriarchy, but STEPFORD is open to so many possible interpretations, and I think that's what makes it such an interesting and lasting book.
1. a feeling of satisfaction you get when your relentless nagging & begging results in another book in your favorite vampire series
Mandatory disclosure time: I was the beta reader for this book and Heather is a good friend of mine. In fact, I basically nagged and nagged her about writing a Branek story after reading and falling in love with the other book in this series, DREAMS FOR THE DEAD. If you know me, you know that I have two modes: "Not interested" and "F*cking obsessed." For this series, it was the latter. I'm now in the works of hounding Heather for a Jared story, and then maybe a Gus story. I'm relentlessly incorrigible.
DEAD HEART went live today on Amazon, and I bought a copy as soon as I got home so I could read and review it in a somewhat unbiased manner (because when you pay for goods and services rendered, I feel like that automatically makes you much more invested in said goods and services). Heather added a lot of new scenes in this book that I hadn't read before, so it was extra fun for me to see what had been kept, what had been changed, what had been expanded on. The sexy scenes in this book were super hot and disturbing, exactly how vampires should be written. Oh, and Branek is a bisexual vampire who swings both ways, as long as there's blood to be drunk and good times to be had. You'll love him to death...and then when you die, he will do horrible things to your dead body.
It's hard for me to say which book I liked best. DREAMS FOR THE DEAD was really, really good, but I like the protagonist of DEAD HEART better, as he's more in the vein (heh, vein) of the gleefully psychotic heroes I find so interesting in fiction (even if I'd avoid them like the plague in real life). This is the sort of hero that Trisha Baker was trying to come up with, I think, when she wrote CRIMSON KISS with its evil vampire hero, Simon Baldevar, but I like Branek so much better.
P.S. Yes, I am the "Nenia" in the dedication. This is the first time someone has dedicated a book to me, ever, and I was so happy that I immediately considered screen-shotting my Kindle app from my PC so I could print that sh*t out and tack it to my wall right next to my diploma. #priorities
But seriously, if you love heroes that will scare the F out of you & dark stories, you should read this.
BLOOD ROOTS was an impulse buy for me because I've read and really liked Richie Tankersley Cusick's Point Horror novels. This book-- this book is quite another type of beast. First, people are shelving it as young adult-- a danger whenever a YA author branches out into genre fiction. This is NOT YA. It is an incredibly disturbing, genre-defying book that I would probably classify as erotic horror. It's a haunted house story, a doomed family story, and a coming of age story, wrapped in the rotted, maggot-crawling shroud of a crumbling Southern Gothic. The best way of describing it, I think, would be saying that it's like a cross between Tanith Lee's DARK DANCE and Amy Engel's ROANOKE GIRLS.
The plot is deceptively simple. Olivia returns to her family's Louisiana mansion after the death of her crazy mother. But once she gets to the mansion, she's creeped out and has second thoughts. Too bad that the cab driver is a jerk and drives away, with her purse and wallet no less, leaving her there with literally nothing but the clothes on her back. Once inside, she meets the family matriarch, Miss Rose, an uncomfortable matronly Black servant stereotype named Yoly, an evil Black voodoo seductress stereotype named Mathilde, and two guys named Jesse and Skyler. Skyler is a cruel and sadistic rake, whereas Jesse plays the role of the consummate gentleman.
Instinct warns her not to tell them who she is, so she pretends that she was just an innocent tourist who was taken advantage of by an unscrupulous cab driver. She gets a job as a servant and does light housework while exploring the grounds, and I literally cannot convey to you how brilliantly done the swampy, claustrophobic backdrop of the house is, and how utterly smothering it makes the story. The stereotypes date the book, but I did kind of wonder if it was meant to be a parodying homage. Even if it wasn't, it certainly reads that way, replete with all of the melodrama that made Cusick such a popular teen horror author. This is honestly my favorite type of horror-- the kind that's psychological and leaves most of the real horrors to the reader's imagination. I think this is a keeper. Just don't get it for your kid.
Clerks but make it body horror, THE CIPHER is the story of two 90s slackers living on the edge of counterculture, working the grind as they struggle for their art on the fringe. Nicholas and Nakota have discovered a black hole in the basement of Nicholas's apartment. They call it the funhole and worship it like some twisted altar god. But it's not enough that it merely occupies their thoughts: first they put a jar of bugs into the funhole, then a mouse, and then a corpse hand. After that, it's only a matter of time before something larger goes down there, too.
None of these characters are likable but they are the vehicles that propel the plot. The toxic relationship between them, and the way their drug fugues propel the surreal horror of the funhole and its physical improbabilities ends up becoming the worst kind of biofeedback loop. Also, Nicholas and Nikota are ex-lovers, and the dynamic between them is toxic and abusive. Nikota isn't above using insults and hurtful words or even sex as leverage to feed into what she wants: exploration of the funhole and all of its mysteries. And the fact that the hole seems to "prefer" Nicholas ends up fueling her hatred and her madness.
The writing style of this book took a while to get used to but I did end up liking it. It's greasy, sleazy, and gross, but in a way that feels poetic rather than exploitative. I liked the comparisons some people made to Poppy Z. Brite. I think Tanith Lee is another similar author in terms of style choices. How you feel about this book is going to depend on your tolerance for body horror and unlikable characters. The ending is inevitable but not particularly happy. Perhaps there's a funhole inside all of us, just waiting to be unlocked...
I LOVE that all of these vintage horror novels are getting the reprints they deserve. Seriously. As someone in the vintage romance community, I really empathize with the horror aficionados trying to track down prized copies of cult classics. I despair of ever getting my hands on a copy of THE SILVER DEVIL, so I feel you. That's why I was so excited when I found out that Grady Hendrix's PAPERBACKS FROM HELL led to a publisher acquiring the rights to and then republishing some of the best of the best of previously out-of-print classics. Under a Paperbacks from Hell series via Valencourt! GENIUS. Someone please do this for romance.
At first I was kind of into BLACK AMBROSIA. It's narrated in first person, which I love, and the heroine is kind of a weird creepy Wednesday Addams type of girl, with a lot of unpleasantness in her life. But the pacing is very slow and kind of plodding. I think it's more character-driven than I typically like my horror novels to be and the take on vampirism is very unusual and strange and I wasn't sure I liked it. The author also does a mixed media style of format, through oral history, where the end of every chapter has an interview with one of the side characters about how they met the heroine. It's unusual and different, and I liked that, but after a while, it also wore thin.
I'd actually recommend this book to people who really enjoyed A DOWRY OF BLOOD, because I feel like they have similar styles. I wouldn't be surprised if the author of ADoB actually came across a copy of this book long ago and was inspired by it, because I feel like this book walked so other female-fronted vampire books could fly. It's well written but just not particularly interesting to me. I got bored.
Some books are bad. Some books are very bad. And some books are so bad that they take the concept of "terrible" to such deplorably base lows that it is almost avant garde. That is how bad CRIMSON SHADOWS was: bad enough that it ought to be showcased in an exhibit as a symbol of existential despair and intellectual ennui.
I've been working my way through the Crimson series since April of last year. CRIMSON KISS was good enough that I bought the entire series immediately. "Finally!" I thought. "A vampire series that isn't afraid to be dark! Complex and interesting characters and relationships, a heroine who wants to kill the hero in the name of revenge, and a 'love interest' who is genuinely dark and terrifying and seems utterly incapable of being redeemed."
Doesn't that sound awesome? I thought so too. Hence the four star rating and foolish optimism.
The second book, CRIMSON NIGHT, was where I began to wonder if I had made a terrible mistake. Simon Baldevar, the vampire antihero from the first book, was pretty solidly established as an abusive, sociopathic freak of nature whose good looks were his only redeeming characteristic. What he did to the heroine was awful (what didn't he do to the heroine? Poor Meghann). It seemed like Baker was setting the stage for a love-hate relationship of epic proportions borne of revenge and reluctant sexual attraction, because Simon was so obviously a villain. Instead, she set about ret-conning everything that had happened in the previous book, painting Meghann's abuse in a rosy light, and actively attempting to make Simon into a romantic hero, replete with candlelight and roses. Oh, and the sex? The sex was weird. Let's just say that it involves blood, and not in an "Oh! I bit you during intercourse! I'm a vampire! I find that sexy!" way.
Since the book ended with them having children, I figured that those children were probably going to come into play in CRIMSON SHADOWS. Vampires aren't supposed to have children, but Simon is good at alchemy and managed to magic Meghann into being fertile for vampy offspring. For some reason, one of the children is human (but psychic) and the other child is vampiric (and deformed). That could be interesting, I thought. Misguidedly. Naively. Innocently.
***WARNING: SPOILERS AND DESCRIPTIONS OF GRAPHIC CONTENT***
Reading this book put me into such a weird mood, because while it was utterly bad and ruined what started out as such a strong series for me, I couldn't help but applaud the author for her give-no-f*cks attitude. Trisha Baker obviously writes whatever she wants, and on one level, I have to respect that. This book was over-the-top in a way that most books stopped being over the top in the mid-80s. It was a throwback to an era where the sex was gratuitous and awful, the heroines were infuriating and foot-stampy, and the heroes were psychotic d-bags who equated murder with courtship.
On the other hand, what the actual hell did I just read? Some of you have been following my status updates for this book and have seen examples of the sex scenes included in CRIMSON SHADOWS. My 'favorite' was this scene where Simon teabags Meghann's bloody neck before having her give him a blowjob. Ew.
Speaking of EW, Mikal. Mikal is a piece of work. He is the vampiric twin of Meghann and Simon and does some of the most heinous things I've seen a character do in a romance novel. He rapes someone to death when he is still just a child (and of course, his character is gay and his father says how disgusting this is). He rapes and kills an old lady. He tricks his sister into sleeping with him, and then later rapes and beats her and his mother (even shouting "I never got to breast feed!" before attacking her in the boob with his fangs, because that just happened).
I also hated Jimmy by the end of this book, too. Jimmy is still hanging around Maggie, even though she's back with Simon. He slut-shames her and insults her and makes her feel bad about being with a serial killer vampire (which...okay, I had mixed feelings about that - because girl, please, have some pride. He hits you and threatens you and treats you like a child - why are you still with him?). After Meghann makes it pretty clear that they're never going to happen, he decides that he's going to go after her daughter, Ellie, instead. Ellie, who is human and seventeen. Ellie, who he raised as a daughter. Jimmy looks thirty and has been a vampire for a lot longer than that. This was so creepy to me. I mean, how do you go from, "I'm your daddy" to "I'm your daddy"? (Please don't answer this. It was a rhetorical question. I don't want to know.)
Throw in a bunch of special snowflake action, additional magical powers that manifest when convenient to the plot, surprise incest, vilification of gay characters, gratuitous gore, and a bunch of stupid sexist a-holes and spineless heroines, and you get the book equivalent of a middle finger. By the time I reached the end, I was ready to flip this book the bird right on back. There's just one book left in this series and, yes, I own it...but now I'm a little afraid to pick it up.
This is one of those rare instances where I watched the movie before I read the book. Coraline (2009) came out while I was in college and all of my friends couldn't stop talking about this creepy story; they said it started out whimsical and turned into a total mindfuck, like Mirrormask (2005) - only better.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the story, Coraline is a little girl who moves to a new apartment in this rural area peopled with colorful characters, like a retired mouse trainer and two washed up film stars who haven't gotten over their halcyon days. Her parents are hard-working and don't really have time for her, so Coraline is often left to her own devices and feeling frustrated as a result. When she finds a mysterious locked door in the wall of her new home that leads to another, magical world, she is absolutely delighted. It's like Narnia, or Harry Potter - only not.
At a glance, the other world seems to be better than Coraline's own reality. Her other mother bakes delicious meals, her other father is always willing to take the time to delight her with games and conversation. Her film star neighbors are young and still very much entertaining, and her creepy mouse-trainer neighbor is ... well, still creepy but now he has something to show for his efforts. Everything in this whimsical world is Coraline's for the asking, if she can only ignore the darker edge beneath the glamor...and the horrible, infamous catch.
I read this book in a single sitting. It's middle-grade, so the language is fairly simple, and the book itself is quite short with drawings interspersed between the text that take up even more of the page count. I liked the story, but as with most of Neil Gaiman's written works, it was lacking some crucial element to make me really love it. I'm finding that to be the case when it comes to Gaiman's works - the movie versions are phenomenal (like Stardust), but the books themselves feel wooden and three-dimensional by comparison, despite being imaginative. I kept comparing the book to the movie while reading, too. Coraline's challenges are way easier in the book than they are in the movie, and the character of Wybie (who I loved in the movie) is omitted entirely in the book.
Overall, CORALINE was an okay book but I'm sorry to say that the movie is much better.
My reactions while reading this book can basically be summed up in a single word: Okay! Okay. Okay? Okay...
Spoiler alert: this book was not okay.
Dear people who read this book and gave it five stars - what the hell? Did you get a different book than I did? What is this so-called brilliant homage that you read, because I got a really lame story about this boy in the friend-zone who ends up obsessed with this manic pixie dream girl stereotype who's in love with the bad boy AND a story about this old man whose name is LITERALLY "Eggs" and his relationship with his passive aggressive wife as he struggles to rectify his cringe-worthy resentment towards his severely disabled son and utter denial of his own health problems.
Oh, and there's some supernatural stuff thrown in there and the book tries to pretend it's so meta but it's completely half-assed. Basically, this is a "supernatural" story the way McDonald's new Szechuan sauce is Chinese food.
Also, let me assure you that I did not hate this book because it was not another YOU. I get that authors don't want to write the same story over and over again and I don't just respect that, I love that. Sometimes it pays off. This didn't. This was a major backslide. If I didn't know better, I would have thought that this was Kepnes's debut effort, and not YOU, because it seems so much more undeveloped and unpolished by comparison.
Part of the reason that I loved YOU so much was the smart writing, the cutting insights on society, the smart pop culture references, and the chilling way that she made reality itself seem just as horrifying as the sociopathic main character (in fact, I may have deactivated some of my own social media accounts after reading that book). This book plodded. It didn't really have much of a plot. The characters were about what you'd expect in one of those airport bookstore-type novels aimed at middle-aged women written by someone who knows nothing about women. And the pop culture references were painful. I think there were references to the movie, Big Eyes, and Colleen Hoover? One of those references is already dated and the CH reference just felt like a "Heyyyyy, buddy!"
I'm really disappointed by this book. I don't want to say anything else because I don't want to spoil too much, but yeah, if you're expecting this to be on par with YOU, just save yourself the trouble right now and lower your expectations by about 200%.
P.S. It's not just me. I buddy-read this with my friend Heather, and I just checked out her review, and it looks like we were disappointed for roughly the same reasons. I feel validated.
Thanks to Netgalley/the publisher for the review copy!
I'm going to be honest, I liked the beginning of this book twice as much as I liked the end, which I despised. The beginning of this book follows the typical "psycho becomes obsessed with a girl" formula, of books like Caroline Kepnes's YOU and John Fowles's THE COLLECTOR. Teo is a medical student who lives with his mom and is a Norman Bates psychotic stuffed shirt type, buttoned up with mommy issues and personal hang-ups. Luckily, he doesn't kill his mom in this one - but he does kill her dog (spoiler).
One day, he meets a carefree and beautiful bohemian type at a party. Her name is Clarice, which maybe is a nod to SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, as well, since Hannibal Lector was also a doctor. Clarice is writing a screenplay called Perfect Days, which sounds a bit like THE BEACH - it's about a bunch of flaky young women with issues who end up going on an adventure across Brazil with a mysterious and darkly handsome stranger.
Teo, naturally, falls in love with her - if by "love," you mean, he stalks her, drugs her, and then kidnaps her, taking her by force across the same road trip in her screenplay. He's determined to make her love him, but Clarice has an iron will and things take an odd turn after several weeks of captivity, when she seems to give in.
This is a brutal story and there's trigger warnings across the board. Apart from the druggings and abductions and animal death, there's also rape and medical gore and a whole bunch of unpleasant and disgusting narrative descriptions. I actually found myself cringing at certain points in the book, which I don't do too often, and haven't done since reading A LITTLE LIFE. I also didn't like the ending at all. Until I got to the end, I was going to praise this book for empowering the heroine, Clarice, and making her such a flawed and dimensional heroine, but the ending felt like a slap in the face. I'm not going to say anything else, but if you think you know what happens, you probably don't.
In the beginning of this book, I thought it would be an easy four stars. By the time the last sixty pages were rolling along, I was considering giving this book a two. I'll average them and give a three.
It's not exactly a secret that I like dark romance novels, especially when it comes to bodice rippers and vampire novels. CRIMSON KISS was basically a combination of both, and I really enjoyed it, despite the dark content. And trust me, there was a lot of dark content: sexual, physical, and psychological torture; rape and abuse; bloody or gory descriptions; mentions of pedophilia & bestiality. It could have been a really awful book but I felt for the most part that Trisha Baker handled the content well. The relationship between Meghann and Simon Baldevar was obviously an unhealthy one, and even when she kept going back to him again and again, it was obvious that she was still caught up in his web. CRIMSON KISS made me feel uncomfortable, but it was also an interesting portrait of twisted characters who become infinitely more debauched and depraved with the jaded ennui that comes from immortality.
CRIMSON NIGHT is...not like that. First, let me just say that if you choose to write your (anti)hero as twisted as Simon is, you have two choices if you want him to end up with the heroine: he either (a) has to enter one hell of a redemption arc (and have a viable reason for wanting to do so), or (b) has to completely and utterly break the heroine psychologically, to the point that it becomes a grim Stockholm syndrome mess. I have seen stories that took both routes, and one usually becomes a dark romance, and the other a dark tragedy. Those are really the only two options when it comes to antihero "love" interests, but I got the impression that Baker wasn't sure which route to pick, so she tried to do both at the same time.
It did not work.
***SPOILERS AND GRAPHIC CONTENT DESCRIPTIONS***
CRIMSON KISS was a portrait of abuse. Simon isolated Meghann from her family, tortured her, abused her, forced her to kill and torture others (including her ex-fiance). He came damn close to killing her, just to prove a point! She was kept in isolation, unless he wanted to parade her around in front of others as a trophy to exert his power over her and show just how confident he was that she couldn't escape. When Meghann did escape, she wasn't just trying to kill him for her freedom. No, she was subverting his control, which he took personally. This was the set-up for what I thought was going to be an intense revenge arc, with the two of them resorting to bloody Machiavellian schemes to get back at one another, culminating in either hate-infused lust, or a twisted mutual respect (like the kind that Hannibal had for Clarice).
Instead, in CRIMSON NIGHT, I honestly felt that Baker set about ret-conning the events of the previous book. First, Simon decides that he doesn't want revenge on Meghann because she didn't really mean to kill him. It was an "accident." At first I thought this was arrogance on his part, but Meghann also seems to corroborate this later on. Boom - angsty revenge plot out the window. Second, Meghann starts looking back on her past with Simon with a rosy lens. She talks about the fun outings they had together, how much she enjoyed having sex with him. It's been a while since I read the book, but I don't remember this happening. She was miserable all the time. She was his prisoner. She was embarrassed by his weird kinks and depressed about being his sexual prisoner. Seeing his treatment of her seemingly romanticized like this really put a bad taste in my mouth.
Simon is still a bad guy in this book. His treatment of his sire, Nicholas, was awful. At one point, he uses his mind powers to convince someone to commit suicide. He disparages the two wives he had before Meghann for being unattractive (I think he describes her as being like "lard") and weak, respectively. He refers to the gay vampire, Charles, as a sodomite/catamite so many times that I lost count. There are some graphic descriptions of torture in this book, as in the other, but they are less frequent. Mostly, we just get to see Simon demean other women (and gay people), while Meghann admires his thickly lined pockets, sexual prowess, and predilection for intimidating people.
Then there was some stuff that was just weird. Weird sexual things involving blood and lactation (almost all the sex in this book involves blood, so if that's a squick factor for you, be forewarned). The vampire pregnancy. The science used to explain said pregnancy (this was actually kind of cool). Simon's druidic/alchemical powers. Demon summoning. Entire swaths of the story set in Elizabethan England (and more ret-conning to make Simon look like a more sympathetic character). This story was just...weird. Uncomfortably weird. Weirdly uncomfortable. Uncomforweird.
You're probably asking yourself why I didn't give it a one-star since I hated it so much. Well, that's the thing. I didn't hate it. I hated the romance, and I hated Simon, and by the end of the story I even hated Meghann because she was just so passive and idiotic. But I didn't hate the story. I couldn't put the book down, and finished it in a day. I've never read a vampire story quite like this.
Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is entirely up to you.
I haven't read a lot of Mira Grant's work, but what I have read, I've really liked. Grant writes good, compelling female heroines, and fuses science fiction and horror with an ease that I haven't really seen anyone master since Michael Crichton - and FINAL GIRLS is something out of a Michael Crichton nightmare.
Dr. Jennifer Webb is the inventor of some controversial technology that "treats" clients by having them undergo and resolve psychic conflict in the form of fully immersive virtual reality horror scenarios paired with psychotropic drugs, all to manipulate the emotional centers of the brain. Esther Hoffman is a pop science reporter for a magazine called Science Digest. She's been sent to the VR clinic by her boss to experience the scenario firsthand and see if the claims of its healing magic have any merit. She's understandably skeptical, because she's been burned by regression therapy before.
Esther agrees to go through the scenario, along with another patient - for SCIENCE - and immediately it's clear that...things are not right. Because when have things ever gone right in books or movies when done for SCIENCE? Science is always the villain in fiction.
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FINAL GIRLS explores the relationship between mind and body in a way that's straight out of The Matrix: that fear response is an electrochemical reaction to outside stimuli. It actually struck me as really interesting, because the "conditioning" done here kind of reminded me of the "conditioning" that's done in CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Both use traumatic events to manipulate emotional response and cognitive associations in order to change behavior. I was actually discussing this in a book club, recently, because my point was that superficial conditioning like this doesn't really work that well because of all the layers of thought processing that exist in the brain: behavior and emotional response are easier to change than core concepts making up identity and personality.I felt like we see that with Esther, who, at one point, understands that her altered reality isn't quite right, even though she gives into it (partially because of the drugs, because, you know, drugs).
I'm not 100% sure I buy this concept. I studied psychology in school, and the premise of this "therapy" felt a lot like that "day-care sex-abuse hysteria" phenomenon that happened in the 80s and 90s, when repressed memories entered the mainstream vocabulary and suddenly everyone was claiming that their schools participated in Satan-worshiping and orgies. Webb's "therapy" felt like it was more about brain-washing and creating false memories than it was about repairing old ones. I wondered if perhaps that was the point. Grant drops several hints that suggest this book could go either way, which is brilliant, if that was truly her intention. I love it when things go all meta on me.
FINAL GIRLS is a horror novel for the 21st century that will have you thinking twice the next time you say to yourself, "I wish my video games were real." Still not convinced it's such a bad idea? I have two words for you, my friend: Silent Hill. Convincingly creepy as it was, I do wish FINAL GIRLS was longer. Reading it was like reading one of those Tor.com shorts. Interesting and frustrating all at once. There was an interesting concept here, and I would have liked to see it explored at length instead of being presented in this abbreviated form.
Thanks to Netgalley/the publisher for the review copy!
Mirrors have always vaguely creeped me out, helped in part by such delightful films as Mirrors and Occulus. There's just something about the idea of something stealing and perverting your image into something demonic or evil that's, well, creepy. When you think about it, cameras are much the same.
SELFIES takes that concept and runs with it in a creepy short story about a girl named Ellie who buys a phone from a kiosk in the mall and starts talking lots of selfies with it. The problem is, some of the selfies don't look right. And the more pictures she takes, the more wrong they look, until suddenly, she starts seeing her face everywhere she looks...only it isn't exactly hers.
This story is very creepy and sent shivers down my spine, but from a technical standpoint, I do feel like it could have been constructed better. The beginning spoils the end, and the details of the story are so vague that you're never really sure what, exactly, is happening. I still wasn't sure what was happening by the end.
Still, SELFIES is free (from Tor.com) and is an interesting (and creepy) take on vanity in the technological age. Read it, if you dare. Just not at night. And not before taking a selfie. o.o
Reading this book was like reliving the summer after freshman year of high school. DEAD SEED was originally published as "Vampires Don't Exist" on Quizilla, a magical fairyland of badly written fanfiction and erotica that has since gone to the internet graveyard. To give you an idea of the quality of some of these fics, "waist" was frequently used interchangeably with "waste" and I distinctly recall one story where the anatomically-confused author seemed absurdly sure that rectal hymens existed.
Anyway, I read Vampires Don't Exist in its original form in 2004. Vampires were super popular back then, too, except instead of TWILIGHT fanfic, it was usually Lestat and Louis fanfic (or fanfic knock-offs), where the vampires were always French and had waist-length long hair and frilly shirts and called everyone "mon cherry" (sic). The heroine in these stories was always a virgin who shopped at Hot Topic and wasn't understood by the preps. She always had a terrible life until the day she was kidnapped by the immortal hero of these stories who would whisk her away to a life of opulently decorated mansions and dubious consent, which she would hate until the day she realized she loved this hero and inevitably developed immortality and/or supernatural powers of her own.
***WARNING: SPOILERS AND DESCRIPTIONS OF GRAPHIC CONTENT***
Vampires Don't Exist took this to the extreme with a hero who was so unabashedly psychotic that I still remembered him over ten years later. Oh, yes, Aimeric was like the Hannibal Lecter of vampires. He even had a room that he decided to upholster in human skin, and a torture room in his mansion's basement, where he would dismember people before the horrified heroine as a way to "punish" her. When I saw that this book was on Amazon, I was a little curious, because I had read the series as a young teenager and how often do we get the opportunity to reexperience the webfics of our youth? So many people inevitably end up pulling their creations and never republishing. There are countless online stories like these that I will never be able to revisit as an adult, and that makes me oddly sad....
Anyway, for $2.99 this seemed like a relatively inexpensive experiment, and I decided, "What the heck. In the immortal words of Darkwing Duck, Let's get dangerous."
Aralyn's mother and sister died in a car crash and her dad became an alcoholic after the accident and doesn't give two coin flips about her. One day, she decides to die by throwing herself over a cliff. She's rescued at the last minute - she thinks, by the human man who's standing nearby watching the sea. He's cute, and they end up kissing, but he's actually Norman Bates and after calling her a slut, starts cutting her with his knife while he attempts to rape her. She's rescued - again - and knocked out, and when she wakes up, it's in a vampire mansion...by her sister, Claire, who it turns out is a vampire.
Claire leaves and Aralyn meets two more vampires, Virgil and Morgan, who's basically Igor in vampire form. Then she meets Aimeric, the Hannibal Lecter vampire. He tries to rape her, she rebuffs him, he takes her to the torture dungeon and tortures a human (he keeps a steady supply in cages so they're always at the ready - ugh). Then he rapes her, and this pretty much happens for a while. Aralyn is defiant, people get tortured, she feels bad, and the cycle continues, with her getting tortured as well, including but not limiting waterboarding, sexual assault by him and others, and branding.
There's a subplot with another vampire called Orrin, who might want to help free Aralyn, but 3/4 of the way through the book, Aralyn decides she loves Aimeric, even after all that physical, sexual, and psychological torture, and she sees his special "room," and he impregnates her by ordering three humans to rape her while she he watches (since vampires can't get people pregnant, hence the title of this newly edited edition, DEAD SEED). As the reader works his or her way through this sadistic psychodrama of torture and misery, they can't help but wonder, will Aralyn ever manage to escape? Or will she stay with this madman of depthless depravity?
I'm not going to spoil the ending for you, because I know I have friends who are just as morbidly curious as I am and I'm 99% sure that this review will encourage them to pick up the title for themselves and see if it's really that bad (yes). Let's just say that the ending gives literal meaning to the term "deus ex machina" and if you have any suspension of disbelief left by the time you get to that point, it will be gone and you will just be like, WTF. And keep in mind that this is after the heroine discovers that vampire transformations will have her looking like a Hot Topic commercial, replete with blue streaks in her hair. Because hair extensions come with the package, I guess.
It's been so long since I read the original that I'm not sure I can really do a fair comparison between the two works. I remember the original being more graphic and messed up, and I'm not sure whether that's because I was younger and just more easily traumatized, or if the author actually cleaned up the work for publication and censored out some of the more graphic parts. I was looking at some of the other reviews for DEAD SEED and other readers have made similar claims that this book felt "toned down", so maybe it was. It's still pretty gross, though. Honestly, what was most amusing to me was how this is just such a perfect snapshot of this type of fiction of this particular time, and the "emo" culture embedded in the prose was just perfect. I could almost envision those Livejournal 100x100 web icons that we used to collect and display on our Xanga pages. It was just...SO NOSTALGIC. She even links to a MySpace page in the back as a way of contacting her. I almost cried. It was wonderful.
That said, it's pretty obvious that this is a self-published work. Characterization is inconsistent, and there are a couple of pretty glaring errors and editor could have fixed. Honestly, if someone went over this with a fine-toothed comb and tightened the characterization, this would be like a modern-day bodice ripper, only with vampires instead of pirates or what have you. I would love that, but I know a lot of people won't, and if dark fiction, rape, torture, and poorly executed Stockholm syndrome plots make you see red, steer clear. If you have time to kill, though, and want to see what the 2004 version of "new adult" fiction looks like, drop the $2.99 and indulge in some over the top craziness that was self-published before self-publishing was cool.
The first half of this book was very good, a solid medieval-inspired gothic fantasy with insane kings, mysterious plagues, religious corruption, and sexy basements. I also liked the selfish and vain heroine, the eponymous Vivia. She reminded me a lot of some of the early 1970s bodice-ripper epics I've read, that follow the heroine's journey from childhood to adulthood, as she grows into a flawed and real person.
VIVIA is an interesting story because it tries to do so many things. I feel like that also becomes its weakness towards the end, but I did enjoy most of it. Vivia ends up becoming a vampire, as her kingdom falls into a slow ruin, and her hero's journey occurs after she is transformed. She marries a really weird and creepy dude who performs Island of Doctor Moreau experiments on his people, and falls under suspicion from superstitious peasants who exercise their own sort of witch hunt when girls go missing.
This is a dark and ugly story, about dark and ugly souls. The writing is beautiful and the world-building is so creative, but like I said before, the first half and the last half end up feeling very disparate, almost like separate books. I wouldn't read this again but I did like it.
Thank you to my friend Caro for buddy-reading this with me!
Tanith Lee died on May 24, 2015. I was devastated, not just because she was so talented and I loved her books, but because she's one of the few authors out there I would have loved to have sat down with over cocktails and chatted with about anything - her books were indicative of an unusual, creative mind. I wish I could have found out more about how she saw the world, what books she liked to read, what inspired her, what chilled her (the other is Rosemary Rogers).
I don't always enjoy Tanith Lee's work, but I always appreciate her books. She has a writing style that is completely her own and some people like it, some people don't. I like it. Obviously. I like purple prose, when done well. Especially dramatic, overwrought prose. (Which is probably why I also love Rosemary Rogers and Victoria Holt.) Lee writes a lot of dark fantasy and sci-fi and Gothic novels, so this flair for the dramatic refines, rather than bogs down, her narratives and lends to the overall atmosphere of her dark worlds.
DARK DANCE is part occult horror, part vintage gothic, and part vampire legend. The main character, Rachaela Day, lives a dreary life in shades of gray. She grew up in a home where her father was absent and her mother was indifferent, and after her mother's passing, she just started going through the motions. She lives alone, has no friends, no hobbies, and is woefully underemployed. She's content with this until one day, people representing her father's family, the Scarabae, request that she return home. To her family.
Rachaela refuses initially but fate - and the Scarabae - have other ideas, and before she's really aware of what's happening, she ends up in a private car to a small British town in the middle of nowhere where the names are always changing and the train never seems to run. In a large manor in the moors, where all of the windows are brilliant stained glass, the Scarabae are there to welcome Rachaela with open arms, including her father, Adamus Scarabae. He's fascinated with her, and hasn't aged a day since Rachaela's conception nearly 30 years ago. But his interest is sinister, as magnetic as it is repellent, and Rachaela's efforts to escape the sinister family might not be enough.
It's been a while since I read a vampire novel that was so unapologetically disturbing. There's shock horror, and then there's "I'm going to tell this story the way it should be told, even if it offends a whole bunch of people and has the censorious members of our community pounding down my door." This book is the latter. Trisha Baker's CRIMSON KISS is like that as well (indeed, Trisha Baker is one of the recommended authors for fans of DARK DANCE. Big surprise, there). What this means is that none of the characters are likable - especially Adamus, Rachaela, and Ruth - and this book features some very disturbing content, like the sexualization of children and incest.The upside is, it's not at all romanticized, in my opinion, and feels more like inevitable doom than a fetish.
New adult authors, take note. THIS is how you write a dark and disturbing story. Save your cutesy "don't read this if you're easily offended" mock trigger warnings. THIS is disturbing and gritty as it was meant to be: inevitable, alluring, and impossible to put down.
RIP, Tanith Lee. I hope you're raising terror among the angels up there in author heaven.
Quick note, Poppy Z. Brite is a trans man named Billy Martin, but his books are still marketed under the Brite "brand," so I will be using the name/brand he uses to sell his books but with the correct pronouns.
I was not expecting to dislike this book more than DRAWING BLOOD because vampires are kind of my thing. But DRAWING BLOOD had two sympathetic (if violent and seriously messed up) protagonists, who I could still root for, whereas LOST SOULS has a cast of people who seem to all be jockeying for the position of Absolute Worst.
There's Nothing, who's half-human/half-vampire, posterchild for the disaffected youth. Then there's Steve and Ghost. They're in a band. Steve's girlfriend just broke up with him because he raped her and Ghost is psychic and kind of in love with Steve (and possibly vice-versa). Then there's the vampires, Molocahi, Zillah, and Twig. They feel very Lost Boys-esque, and basically drive around getting drunk and killing people.
As one does, as an immortal child of the night.
There's not really a story, just lots of road tripping and drugs and sex and violence. Which I would normally be okay with in a vampire book, except it also comes with douchebaggery and incest and self-harming and suicide and underage sex, and those are things that I do not like reading about. They're dropped so casually too, and in the case of the incest, it comes completely without warning.
Brite is not a bad writer. He has an ability to viscerally convey a scene that is AMAZING. Like, it's cinematic, and in the case of DRAWING BLOOD, it managed to bring a visual medium to life; I absolutely loved the way he talked about art and drawing and the way artists pour their souls into their work (to the extent that perhaps their art robs them of it). That level of writing was present here, too, but with such awful characters, it was like looking at the beautiful setting of a move you hate.
I will say, though, that this was an excellent snapshot of the '90s goth scene. SO much Bauhaus.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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