The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian

Airline pilot Chip Linton's life changes forever when he is forced to crash land his plane into a lake. Had it not been for a boat disturbing the water at just the wrong time, it could have been done relatively smoothly, but instead, thirty-nine people died. Chip survived. Several months on, still devastated by the accident and suffering PTSD, he moves with his wife Emily and twin daughters Hallie and Garnet to a new home: a big, old house in an out-of-the-way village in a different state.

But there is no escaping from the past. In the basement of their new home, Chip finds a door sealed with thirty-nine bolts, and the significance of this number - the same number as victims of the air disaster - is not lost on him, and its presence taunts him. But when Chip takes an axe to the door to reveal... a boarded-up coal hole, it is his own ghosts that are freed from their prison, in an ambiguous mix of ghost story and psychological horror. The Linton's house seems to serve the same purpose as The Shining's Overlook Hotel, a dark, creepy place with a sinister past, which makes already damaged people much, much worse. Like the best Gothic settings, this house is not merely a place where the action happens.

The strangeness is not limited to the house, however. Many of the Lintons' new neighbours are not quite like other people. Many of the women spend all their time in their greenhouses tending herbs, baking vegan food and mixing up herbal remedies, and they all seem to have names like Sage, Anise and Clary. The other people in the town shun them, even fear them, though they seem friendly enough, taking a keen interest in the twins and welcoming them into their new home. But they know too much, and seem to have their own purposes for wanting the new family to join their circle, and as the Linton family spend more and more time with the "herbalists," Bohjalian evokes a creeping sense of claustrophobic dread.

The Night Strangers is a vivid, gripping read, though a very dark one. Much as you may hope, there is an inevitability that the book won't have a cosy ending. In fact, it is not until the epilogue that the outcome of the climactic scene is made clear. I found myself re-reading in case I'd missed something, but no, the last chapter left the characters' fate unclear. Half The Shining, half Stepford Wives (with a strong seasoning of magical herbs), The Night Strangers left me feeling deeply unsettled.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs

With its simple cover illustrated with an old black-and-white photograph, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children can be immediately identified as a strange, spooky book. Apart from the lack of fancy artwork or graphics, there seems to be something a bit uncanny about the girl. Perhaps it's just the obvious oldness of the picture, being blurry, unfocused, not sharp like modern photography. Maybe it's the title. Perhaps it's the fact that the little girl's feet are not quite touching the ground...

Miss Peregrine is a unique book in that author Ransom Riggs has illustrated his eerie fantasy story with real vintage photographs found and rescued by collectors; photographs that, like the girl on the cover, seem not quite right. The photographs themselves are fascinating, and I would have happily bought this book for them alone. But around the photo collection, Riggs has woven a dark, twisted narrative based around an orphanage that is not as it seems.

After the death of his beloved grandfather, American teenager Jacob goes to an island off Wales. He hopes to see the children's home where his grandfather spent the war years after his escape from the Nazis in mainland Europe. What Jacob discovers, at first, is a ruin. No one has lived in Miss Peregrine's Home for decades. As he explores deeper, he discovers stranger truths about Miss Peregrine and the children in her care than he could ever have dreamed of.

This book drew me in straight away, with a strong character in Jacob's grandfather, and the mystery of his death, and his past life. The ruined orphanage is a classic gothic ruined house, thick with atmosphere and unfinished business, on the borderline between uncanny-unexplained and fantasy. I felt that the book was at its best at this point, before the secret of Miss Peregrine's was made clear. Even when the truth began to unfold, I was impressed with the originality and unexpected explanation of a ghostly situation.

However, once the scene had been set and the story started to get under way, I confess I found myself losing interest. I felt that Miss Peregrine became less remarkable when the danger, the villains and monsters, were identified. The genre seemed to switch from atmospheric ghost story (of a sort) to a much more generic teen fantasy adventure, and it lost its grip on me. It is set up for the possibility of a sequel, but I feel it would be more effective if it were kept concise and unique.

The Considine Curse, Gareth P, Jones

I don't often buy books on impulse, and I rarely buy books from the 9-12 age group, but in Waterstone's the other day I made an exception for The Considine Curse. The story of a "very normal" Australian teenager who goes to visit her strange cousins in England after the death of their grandmother, it looked like a cross between the Addams family and the Lemony Snicket books. Mariel's cousins are very close, many of them hostile to outsiders, and although they share the same grandmother, they don't consider Mariel to be one of them. Mariel's mother didn't even tell her she had any family, and as she gets to know them, Mariel can see why! Only now her mother wants to take her away from her home, school and friends. Mariel does not approve.

The Considine cousins are certainly a strange bunch, each with their own characteristics. Lily and Amelia are strange but seem friendly enough, but Oberon is threatening, and eight-year-old Elspeth is one of the creepiest children I've come across in fiction, oozing malevolence and speaking only in sinister rhyme, hinting at a terrible fate in store for Mariel. I guessed at the family's secret early on, but this did not spoil the story for me, although one piece of foreshadowing came across as too heavy-handed and unnecessary. The story is a great mix of a page-turning family mystery and a gothic undercurrent that gets darker and more dangerous as the story goes along.

I was quite shocked at the level of bloodthirstiness for a book aimed at pre-teens, but what I found more disturbing was the ending. I think it was supposed to be a happy ending, but it was rather bittersweet and a somewhat morally dubious. Although as an adult I don't mind stories with "untidy" conclusions, if I had read this book when I was ten or eleven, I would have been concerned about the decisions Mariel took. Her story may have ended pretty well, but I would have been - and was, a bit - troubled about the wider-reaching consequences for the family and community. Perhaps I think too much. Still, The Considine Curse is an enjoyable, intriguing and creepy read.

Movie Monday: Never Let Me Go

I read the novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro just before the film was released and all the publicity was coming out. As it happened, I was non-stop busy when the film hit the cinemas, and had to leave it a couple of weeks. That's OK, I thought, I can see it later - except it had left the cinema within about two weeks! After all the publicity, and the casting of Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan, I had expected it to be much more popular. But now the film's on DVD I've been able to rent it from Blockbuster to see how it translates to the screen.

Kathy (Mulligan), Ruth (Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield) grew up at Hailsham school, a seemingly ordinary English boarding school, but one that when examined closely, seems a little odd. The children of Hailsham are being raised for a very specific purpose, which is revealed to them gradually, before they are too old to quite understand, until they are grown up knowing everything which is too deeply ingrained in them for them to expect any other life.

It's not very easy to compare the reading experience of Never Let Me Go with watching the film. There can only be one first time, and to watch the film knowing what is to come makes seemingly insignificant little scenes become heartbreaking. To me, it seemed that the Big Reveal was made more obvious in the film, but perhaps that was because I already knew it. It also seemed to come a lot earlier. The book seemed to dwell on the Hailsham years for a lot longer, but it might be that I was just reading it slowly.

The film certainly emphasised the not-quite-rightness of Hailsham in a more definite way than the book. When I read things that seemed a little out of place, I couldn't be sure if it was my interpretation of Ishiguro's choice of language that made things seem skewed, or if they really were. The book is narrated by Kathy H, which gives the reader a personal view of the story from within. Although Kathy narrates part of the film too, the visual medium distanced me and made me see the friends' situation as an outsider. The new  Hailsham Guardian, Miss Lucy (Sally Hawkins), is a more relatable character, as she comes to Hailsham as an adult and is plunged into a situation that doesn't seem natural to her, whereas the children know no other life.

The Hailsham students, even as grown-ups, are visibly different from people of the outside world. Even after leaving school, they are isolated, living in shared accommodation with other people "like them." Their attempts to act like "outsiders" are amusing but pitiful - copying cheesy American sitcom characters because they know no other way to relate, and sitting stiffly in a cafe, too afraid and overwhelmed even to know how to order lunch. These are clearly outsiders, conditioned for plot reasons to be different from non-Hailsham people, and yet it's nurture, not nature, that makes them so.

The tone of the book is subdued, pensive and moody, and the film turns this right up with the help of the sad, eerie soundtrack, the characters' drab costumes and unexcitable acting. The literary cushion is stripped away and the film really drove home the passivity of the characters. Most books set in this sort of world show the fighters, those who rebel against their lot. But not everyone is a revolutionary, and Never Let Me Go's central trio are those ordinary people who have no thoughts that life could be any different. It's a bleak world, and what is thoughtfully melancholy in the book is shown up as plain depressing here.

I'm glad I got to see this film - finally! - but I think it works better as a companion to the book than viewed on its own. Alone, it is too harsh and leaves rather an unpleasant aftertaste. Kathy ends by pondering about how everybody dies (or "completes") wondering if life could have given them more, thinking they've missed something and been left unfinished, and that was the feeling I got from the film. I don't think anything too important was omitted, but the movie wasn't quite satisfying. I felt there ought to be more - but what?

Lament, Maggie Stiefvater

Lament is the first novel from Maggie Stiefvater, author of Shiver and its sequel Linger, but it has only been published in the UK this year. The story is familiar to a connoisseur of teen fantasy fiction. Teenage girl starts a romance with a strange and handsome boy, only to discover that there's more to her new boyfriend -and the world - than meets the eye. Her new boyfriend has a dark and dangerous past that is catching him up and the teenage girl finds that a lot of people want to kill her. Stripped down to the basic plot outline, this could be Hush, Hush, or Twilight or one of many other dark fantasy romances. It might have been vampires, or angels, or werewolves. In this case it's the fair folk - the faeries.

The power of Lament is in the details. Ms Stiefvater writes with humour and lyrical prose which is highlighted by the theme of music throughout the novel. Heroine Deirdre is a skilled harpist, and it seems that her musical genius is more than just a talent. Dee is a "cloverhand" - one who can see faeries, and who has some magical, psychic abilities of her own. Music is no earthly art here.

I found that the first half of the book read as a fairly generic teen novel with an Interchangeable Magical Boyfriend Creature, and the platonic childhood best friend of the opposite sex who could be the third corner of a potential love triangle. As is often the way, I felt more inclined to wish for James the Best Friend to win Dee's heart rather than the more glamorous, troubled Luke with his faerie background.

I was rather taken aback that after Dee discovered the details of Luke's terrible past, she seemed more concerned that he had expressed his love for her than that he had been sent to assassinate her! After her initial anger, I thought Dee was too forgiving too soon, but it is to Ms Stiefvater's credit that she evoked sympathy for the couple even if I rolled my eyes a little.

Despite his otherworldly ways, uncanny knowledge of Dee's life and his habit of calling her "pretty girl," Luke is - or was once - human. When we get to meet the fair folk themselves, the book seemed to shift from YA "paranormal romance" to a more traditional, mythical fantasy genre. The fair folk are not interchangeable with the un-vampiric vampires and fallen angels that are in many books; these are definitely the faeries of old: amoral and fascinated by the humans with their funny notions of good and evil. They are majestic, dangerous, very inhuman and mischievous - from an era long ago when the word "mischief" had far more sinister connotations than it does now. These faeries are of the race of Oberon and Titania, whose quarrels put nature in turmoil. When I was at university much of my creative writing was influenced by the tales of the fair folk of old - not Tinker Bell and the cute little pixies that people tend to think of when they hear the word "fairies." Maggie Stiefvater's fair folk were of the same sort, and so well-written that I half wondered if the author had faerie blood herself, or was a cloverhand like Dee. Certainly she seems to be able to create any kind of art she tries her hand at: creative writing, painting and music.

Lament is a powerful, enchanting novel that, like the four-leaf clovers that play their part in awakening Dee's powers, opens the reader's eyes to that beautiful, deadly other realm.

If you enjoyed this, you might like:
The Bitterbynde trilogy by Cecelia Dart-Thornton
Ash by Malinda Lo

Mini-reviews 3: Toast & The Woman He Loved Before

Toast – Nigel Slater

I was given a free copy of Nigel Slater’s autobiography Toast at a book party in my local Waterstone’s store, as part of the World Book Night celebrations. World Book Night was an initiative when publishers produced a million special editions of a range of well-loved books, for book-lovers across the UK to give away to friends, family, colleagues or total strangers. My former boss was at the event handing out copies of Toast, which was recently made into a TV movie starring Freddie Highmore and Helena Bonham Carter, among others.

Nigel Slater is a well-known TV chef, and taste is one of the most evocative senses, so it makes sense that Toast is a food-based memoir. It is a quick read, written in short chapters - some more like paragraphs - each devoted to one of Slater’s childhood memories based on to some food item. Some chapters are about general family rituals based around a dish, others cover a very specific memory. The novel takes us through Slater’s childhood, the grief at his mother’s death, and the marshmallows which cannot replace a goodnight kiss. Slater describes his discomfort as his father’s remarriage to Mrs Potter, their cleaner, and his lonely teenage years living in the middle of nowhere. We follow Slater through his school days, cookery course, first jobs up until he moved to London to start his career. Toast succeeds in making me feel peckish and nostalgic for a time I never knew (1960s-70s, as far as I can tell) when British food was not as cosmopolitan as it is now – pasta, pizza, curry, now staple parts of the British menu, all being dismissed as “foreign muck.” Though at times I think the food described sounds bland at best, unappetising at worst, Slater writes with fondness and affection. But I gag in sympathy when Slater describes the various ways his father would persuade, force or fool him into eating an egg – the one food I can’t even swallow is eggs. Yuck.

The Woman He Loved Before – Dorothy Koomson

Last time I read a Dorothy Koomson novel, I dithered about whether or not it could be classed as “chick-lit,” and had to consider what I meant by the term. Despite its candy-coloured dustjacket, The Woman He Loved Before is not so much a romance novel as a thriller with ghostly undertones. With gritty, unflinching writing about a woman trapped in prostitution, and another suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, it cannot be described as "fluffy" by any stretch of the imagination, although it starts off “chicky” enough, by recounting a relationship that started off as loathing-at-first-sight before turning into attraction and love. When Libby is injured in a car accident, she finds herself re-examining her relationship with her husband, who has widowed when they met, and who she suspects has never really got over the death of his first wife, Eve. Although Eve’s death was always put down to being a tragic accident, the doubt is there: was she murdered, and is Libby herself in danger? Then she finds Eve’s secret diaries which reveal a shocking past and horrific secrets about the family. The Woman He Loved Before would be a great companion novel to Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, exploring the unenviable role of the second wife, with themes of the importance of choices, and control – or lack thereof – over one’s own life.

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

From the cover of the book, I had a vague idea that it would be a literary, people- and relationship-based novel - which it is - maybe like Atonement. Which it is not. I suspect my mind remembered the last book I read with a picture of Keira Knightley on the front cover. I also expected some kind of hint at ghostly goings-on, because the picture of Knightley at the top made me think of Cathy Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights.

What I actually got was something very different - and if you want to read this book open-mindedly, I suggest you don't read past this paragraph - and whatever you do, avoid watching the movie trailers. I'm avoiding plot spoilers but will be making reference to genre and writing style. The short version of the review is: "This book is great, read that instead of the blog."

Potential spoilers below

The first thing Ishiguro tells us is that the setting is "England, late 1990s," and we meet our narrator, Kathy, who tells us a little about her position working as a carer, before sending us back in time to her childhood at Hailsham school. From the very beginning, subtle uses of language alert us to the suspicion that this is not quite the world as we know it. "Carer" doesn't seem to mean quite what we expect it to, and when Kathy describes her school life, the adults are described not as "teachers" but "guardians." A seemingly insignificant choice of word, that could just be a school breaking the trends, but nothing in Never Let Me Go is accidental. Similarly, the emphasis on what is considered important or not is ever so slightly off-kilter, such as the urgency for Hailsham students to be "creative," and the worry when one seems to have no artistic talents. Clearly Hailsham is preparing its students for something - but what?


When the "big reveal" comes, to be honest it's not much of a shock. Superficially it might seem that Ishiguro has been clumsy, leaving too many clues in the text so that that the plot twist isn't as dramatic as it should be. I realised that this, too, is no accident. Miss Lucy, the guardian who blurts out exactly what the students' future holds, tells them that they've been "told and not told," and Tommy expands on this, hypothesising that "the guardians had [...] timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand the latest piece of information. But of course we'd take it in at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly." Like the students, when I read this book there was no one moment of realisation. When Miss Lucy made her outburst, I just realised that I'd known all along. A very, very clever piece of writing.


Alongside the "knowing all along," was a sort of anaesthetising of the horror. The narration is simple, unflowery, and very matter-of-fact. Where apparently insignificant events are elevated to importance, the destiny of Kathy, Ruth, Tommy and other students should be shocking and horrific, but the characters' unquestioning acceptance that this is just the way the world is, makes for a chillingly calm read. Never Let Me Go had a slow-burning effect on me, its impact increasing after I'd finished reading and carried on thinking about it. I was very glad not to have seen the film trailer before reading the book as it gives far too much away and would have spoiled the book, not only in plot details but in its genre and literary qualities.

I'm looking forward to seeing the film in February and would be interested in reading more of Ishiguro's work.

Liar, Justine Larbalestier

Hi everyone! Sorry about the lack of updates in the last week or so. Life has been so busy in the run-up to Christmas that I haven't even had much time for reading. There have been carol services, Christmas parties, musical rehearsals and a heap of overtime at work that have kept me from my beloved books. But I aten't dead* - although for the second Christmas in a row I've had my worst cold of the year - and hopefully there will be regular updates again from now on. I've also merged this blog with my film and TV review site, because I didn't update that one often enough to justify having a separate blog.

I preordered the paperback of Liar on Amazon a couple of months ago, and it turned up at home on Christmas Eve, by which time I'd all but forgotten about it, so it really was a surprise Christmas present from myself to me.

Micah is a compulsive liar, always has been. When she started high school she passed for a boy for a little while, with a boy's name, short hair and underdeveloped figure. Lies lead to more lies until no one knows what to believe about her. But when her sort-of boyfriend dies suddenly, it is time for her to tell her story. The truth. Or at least her truth.

The clue is there in the title: Liar. Micah vows again and again to tell the truth in her story, and then contradicts herself: okay, that was a lie but everything I say from here on is true. Well... except that bit. Oh, and that.

I wanted to see if you would buy it. And you did.
You buy everything, don't you?
You make it too easy.

You find yourself wondering what, if anything, you have been told is the "truth" - and what, after all is the true version of a work of fiction? The narrator's account, even if she is a pathological liar? After all, Micah is the only narrator we have. Are we supposed to read between the lines to understand what the author wants us to believe really happened? Many works of literature give you clues towards an alternative interpretation, but Larbalestier doesn't give us anything to go by except Micah's words, and as we have established, these can't be trusted. Instead, the reader has to draw their own conclusions, so that the book has as many meanings as it has readers.

It seems straight-forward enough at first, a contemporary crime story set among New York high school students. Halfway through, there is a sudden shift in genre which led me to think, "this is ridiculous! Surely we're not meant to believe that in this story?" It seems clear, at first, when Micah is telling the truth and when she is lying, then everything is shaken up and you're not sure what's what any more. Micah argues that she lies because we wouldn't believe the truth, and "maybe I lie because the world is better the way I tell it." We're left with a choice. We can accept her final version of her story, discard the parts she's confessed to be untrue and accept her story at face value. Or we can wonder, speculate and come to our own conclusions. I think I know my version of events, but to say more would be straying into spoiler territory.

A very intelligent read that will end up asking more questions than it answers.

*Terry Pratchett

Ash, Malinda Lo

Despite the age-old saying, I knew as soon as I saw the cover for this book that I would have to read it. Isn't it gorgeous? It made me think of Alice in Wonderland or some eerie fairy tale, and reading the blurb on the back it became clear which it resembled most:

"With her parents both gone, Ash finds herself a servant in the house of her ruthless stepmother and there seems no hope of finding happiness again.

"But Ash is unaware of her mother's legacy, and that it will lead her to a magical place. A place where love, identity and belonging are all waiting...

Yet straight away it became clear that Ash is much more than the fleshed-out Cinderella retelling its description would suggest. I was reminded of fantasy author Cecelia Dart-Thornton throughout the novel, which takes a classic tale as a starting point and takes the story where it wants to go. Though not as extremely verbose as Dart-Thornton, Lo has a descriptive writing style like dark chocolate: rich, seductive and indulgent, but to be savoured, not wolfed down.

The focus point of the story's setting is the Wood, where the fairies reign, mostly forgotten by human and believed to be nothing but "rustic superstition." There is a dreamlike quality to any scenes involving the fairies and the lines are blurred between Ash's imagination and reality. The fairies are not the species to whom Cinderella's usual fairy godmother belongs, distant cousins to Glinda the Good Witch. These are the fairies of old: beautiful, dangerous and completely alien, fascinating and yet somehow horrible at the same time.

"They were grand and beautiful and frightening - the horses' heaads shining white, their eyes burning like a blacksmith's forge. Their riders, too were like nothing she had ever seen before: ethereal men and women with pale visages, their cheekbones so sharply sculpted that she could see their skulls through translucent skin [...] and she could not close her eyes though the sight of them made her eyes burn as if she were looking at the sun."

To me, these old-fashioned fairies of long ago have more than a passing resemblance to vampires - more of a resemblance than many creatures given that name in contemporary fiction, at least. Ash's Fairy Godfather figure, Sidhean, demonstrates this in his declaration of obsession for her:

"I told her that you were mine, that I had given you this cloak, that she could not have you."

Does anyone else find themselves thinking of Dracula here?

Ash is a beautifully-written fairy tale. The evil stepmother and eldest stepsister are straight out of the story-as-we-know-it, but the younger stepsister, Clara, has some redeeming qualities. And as the story progresses, it becomes quite clear that the ending will not be the one we have come to expect. Oh, Ash gets her happily-ever-after, but it is not with Prince Aiden (who you probably know better as Prince Charming, but who actually features very little in this version of the story) nor with "fairy godfather" Sidhean. It is not with a prince at all.