Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill

Coming out the other side of a reading slump, I found myself in the fantasy and horror section of the library looking for something a bit different. I'm working my way through The Lord of the Rings, one chapter per night, so I didn't want a Tolkien-inspired high fantasy epic, nor did I want anything with vampires in. But Heart-Shaped Box stood out from the rest. When it was published a few years ago, I'd read the back blurb more than once, but never got as far as buying it. Ditto Joe Hill's other novel, Horns. But there was something that appealed about these books - and Neil Gaiman's recommendation on the front sealed the deal.

Retired death metal star Judas Coyne has built up quite a collection of sinister and macabre artifacts over the years, so when he sees someone selling a ghost on the internet, he can't refuse. But when the black, heart-shaped box arrives on his doorstep, Jude discovers this is not just any old ghost, but one which will make him confront the darkness in his past.

Heart-Shaped Box had me utterly gripped from the beginning. To buy a ghost on the internet was a brand-new idea in a world of recycled stories. I wasn't really sure what to expect from this book: was this a quirky dark fantasy or an out-and-out horror? It turned out to be a more straight-forward horror than I was expecting - though perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised, since Hill is the son of Stephen King, and from whom better could he have learned his craft? He doesn't take long to launch into a story of suspense, with fear being conjured by descriptions of the wrong sort of nothing, and then when that is replaced by the wrong sort of something, it is narrated so matter-of-factly that it took a moment for what I was reading to sink, which, when it did, happened with a really creeping horror.

The ghost of the story is a far more solid presence than in other ghost stories, possibly because he is quickly named and described as "Craddock" or "The dead man." This haunting is no vaguely hostile threat that may or may not be influencing Jude's world. Craddock is a person, not just a presence, and a particularly malevolent one. Once he appears, the story becomes more standard horror fare - there's something in Jude's house that is out to get him, and might also be in his head. But that's not all there is. There is plenty of variety in Heart-Shaped Box: it is a something-in-the-house horror story, a road trip, a psychological thriller and more. Three or four times, when I thought I had an idea of what sort of story this was going to be, Hill threw in a twist that changed everything.

Jude Coyne is a seriously messed-up individual, and I can't say I liked him. Having an unsympathetic protagonist will usually turn me off a novel - but though I didn't like Jude, he wasn't unsympathetic. He was a man with many layers, a tough history and believable reasons for being who he was. I was convinced at first that his fate was inescapable - and I didn't want that. I wanted him to survive and come through the story unscathed, if not unchanged. (You'll have to read the book to find out if he does or not.) Once or twice, I nearly lost all sympathy with Jude - he does/is/has done some pretty awful things - but Joe Hill kept me caring despite Jude's best efforts. And I loved Marybeth, (also known as Georgia,) Jude's stubbornly loyal girlfriend of half his age.

Affinity, Sarah Waters

Upper-class Margaret Prior, after recovering from a long illness, takes on a position as “Lady Visitor” to the women’s wards at Millbank Prison. There, she meets Selina Dawes, a professing medium, imprisoned for fraud and assault. Margaret becomes fascinated by Selina and as the two women grow closer, she finds herself drawn under Selina’s spell. But is Selina a clever fraud, or does she really possess unearthly powers?

I’ve read two of Sarah Waters’ novels before this one: The Little Stranger which I loved, and The Night Watch which left me cold. Although ser in the Victorian era, Affinity has a lot in common with The Little Stranger, with its eerie atmosphere and possibly – possibly not – supernatural elements. Waters’ prose is beautiful, immediately drawing me into the story, creating an atmosphere of suspense and perfectly recreating the language of the era, so that I could quite believe I was reading a contemporary of Charles Dickens or Wilkie Collins. The novel is written in two plot threads: the main story being presented as Margaret’s private journal of 1974, interspersed with entries from Selina’s medium’ log book from a year or two previously, which showed how she came to find herself in prison.

Much of the story takes place in Millbank prison, which is where the two women meet and interact. Waters describes the harsh, dehumanising conditions of the Prison, again, in a Dickensian manner. Margaret’s role as “Lady Visitor” is to befriend the prisoners and exert a good influence over them, to encourage them to repent of their crimes and reform their lives, yet the contrast between her and them seems too big for this to be more than wishful thinking on the part of the prison authorities. Margaret’s first encounter with Selina highlights the seemingly insurmountable differences between Visitor and prisoner – yet, in many ways, she is not so different from them after all. Margaret is outwardly a dutiful daughter, sedate, proper and genteel, but beneath that veneer she is frustrated, imaginative and highly-strung. Ultimately, Selina is the character with the influence.

Waters’ exploration of Victorian Spiritualism made a fascinating novel. The common conception of the Victorian age is rather a puritanical one, everyone being prim and proper and with the urban myth of people covering their piano legs for modesty! But it was also an era of discovery, and people found the world as they knew it quite turned upside-down. Anything might be possible! Affinity, like the two aforementioned classic, is a proper gothic novel, creepy and eerie, with seemingly clear lines blurring, between life and death, madness and sanity, real and imagination. I did not quite trust Selina through this novel and racked my brains trying to work out how she managed her “tricks,” or whether she was a genuine medium. There seemed to be no natural explanation for her accomplishments.

But were my suspicions of Selina right? In The Little Stranger, Waters leaves the ending ambiguous, and I wondered whether she might do the same here, to leave the reader to work out for themselves what had happened. Does Waters answer all the questions? Well, Affinity is such a wonderful read, I couldn’t possibly spoil it for you – you’ll just have to read it for yourself. All I will say is that there was a wonderful twist at the end, one that Waters has set the plot up for, and yet you shouldn’t see it coming. Affinity is a gorgeous and very satisfying tale, and I’m keen to get my hands on the rest of Ms Waters’ work. An excellent novel.

 

If you liked this you may enjoy:
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins,
Film: The Illusionist

Beloved, Toni Morrison

I chose to read Beloved as part of Sarah's Back to the Classics challenge, as it was a regular title to appear on lists of books banned from school libraries. Looking it up on Goodreads, opinions were polarized: reviewers either loved or hated Beloved and could not understand any other point of view. I decided to give the book a 50-page or 3-chapter trial, and decide at that point whether or not it was for me.

Beloved tells the story of Sethe, a former slave who chose to kill her small daughter rather than allow her to be taken back into slavery. After many years of mysterious activity in Sethe's home, a young woman appears at her door who calls herself Beloved - the name on the child's gravestone - and who knows things that only Sethe's children ever knew. Is this girl Sethe's daughter miraculously returned to her, or does Beloved have a more sinister purpose?

When reading Beloved I had no difficulty in understanding why it is a regular banned book. With themes of infanticide, cruelty, rape and torture, Beloved is a dark, disturbing novel, not suitable for young or sensitive readers. However, I found myself wondering if people call for its censorship out of discomfort, not wanting to look closely at a shameful era of history; one which, like Beloved, will not stay dead.

I have to say, I didn't really enjoy Beloved. Beside the obvious, that it covers subjects highly unpleasant to think about, I found the writing style very patchy. Though Morrison's writing can be beautiful and poetic, I found it somewhat dense and at times impenetrable. I tuned in and out of the writing and sometimes found myself reading a few pages without really taking in what was going on. She switches between characters, past and present and first and third person narration with little warning, and if I'd put the book down it took me a little while to be able to tune back in to what was going on at a particular point. At one point, the book took on a stream of consciousness style which, although full of fascinating language and imagery, I confess I couldn't get its meaning. I think my personal preference of storytelling is more traditional.

And yet, when I reached the end, I found myself unable to let Beloved go, feeling that it needs at least a second reading to get everything out of it. Perhaps more. I didn't always enjoy reading it - and yet, I felt the need to do so again. Love it or hate it, or if, like me, you don't quite know what to make of it, ultimately Beloved is an important work of literature which deserves its place as a classic.



Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson

At the beginning of Banned Books week in September, the Speak Loudly internet campaign reminded me that among the rubbish, there is a lot of important and good-quality young adult fiction about, and I returned to Speak, one of my favourite books when I was about sixteen. Anderson's mixture of humour and tragedy, poetry and really serious issues that made you think, and I was excited to read another of Laurie Halse Anderson's novels.

I found Wintergirls to be a much more disturbing and difficult read than Speak, full of poetic and creative imagery, but lacking the latter's humour. Its central character is Lia, an eighteen-year-old girl who is trapped in a dark, cold world of anorexia and self-harm. Cassie, the girl who was her best friend since third grade, has just died, killed by her own eating disorder, and added to Lia's troubles is the knowledge that Cassie had tried to call her that night, not once but thirty-three times.

Unlike Speak, whose sad, lonely protagonist was one I could recognise all too well in myself, I found it difficult to identify with Lia, and found myself baffled and frustrated to read her thoughts and know all too well where she's all wrong. A few years ago, I was with a friend of a friend who was stick-thin and counting calories on the back of a pot of pasta salad. I could see she had a problem, but I felt helpless, knowing that I couldn't get through to her telling her that someone of her age and size shouldn't even know what a calorie was. Reading Wintergirls provoked the same reaction, and I felt quite baffled and adrift in Lia's thoughts. It was clear from early on that her goal of losing more weight wasn't about looking slim to be pretty, but a target to aim for, and keep aiming for. When she achieves her goal of losing five pounds, she sets herself five more to lose.

"The number doesn't matter. If I got down to 070.00, I'd want 065.00. If I weighed 010.0, I wouldn't be happy until I got down to 005.00. The only number that would ever be enough would be 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love. I finally get it."

Now, I'd always been told that "eating disorders are mental illness," and "it's not about losing weight, but control," but I'd never really been able to understand this. Books I'd read as a teen exploring the issue, tended to be rather two-dimensional: girl (because they're always girls in the books) thinks she's fat, girl goes on a diet, girl keeps pushing to lose a little more weight, family starts to worry, girl thinks they shouldn't worry, girl admits she has a problem, girl gets treatment.

Wintergirls has many more dimensions. As an outsider I found Lia difficult to fully sympathise with: she knows she's got a problem, why doesn't she want to be helped? At the same time, as an insider - reading her thoughts in first person - I found her hard to understand. Then I realised, Lia was trapped, didn't understand her own thoughts. Anderson uses a great deal of poetic imagery, which could be very effective but I couldn't always understand what she was trying to say. Again, perhaps this was a deliberate decision - to portray a messed-up mind, where madness and reality mix and mingle to create a new reality. Wintergirls evoked in me pity more than empathy, and I think I will need to read it more than once to pick up on what I missed the first time around.

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

It's the beginning of December, and for the first time I can remember at this time of year, there is a thick layer of snow on the ground. A drunken-looking snowman named Roderick is staring through the dining room window with his brussels sprouts for eyes, wearing a college scarf and mittens. Yesterday I went shopping for Christmas nibbles: sugared almonds, turkish delight, chocolate mints, etc. It was the perfect time for my annual re-read of A Christmas Carol.

I'm not going to recap the story here, as we all know it, even if we've never read the book. If it's not Mickey Mouse, it's the Muppets - everyone knows at least one version of the Charles Dickens classic. After all, it is something that has helped to shape what we think of as an old-fashioned Christmas. The words Scrooge, and "Bah! Humbug!" are universally recognised and applied to anyone who expresses anything but unconditional joy in the festive season. But on this reading, I found myself thinking that it is not Scrooge's dislike of tinsel and plum pudding that is his doom, but his callousness towards his fellow man. To Dickens the social commentator, celebrating Christmas is more than a time to be jolly and eating a big meal with the family, before arguing about whether to watch the Queen's Speech or the EastEnders doom-and-gloom seasonal special on TV. It's more than pretending to be grateful for the socks and reindeer jumper knitted by Granny.* Scrooge's nephew puts it best:

"I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of the people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therfore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it."

Ross Kemp as Eddie Scrooge in a
21st century take on the tale.

Christmas is interchangeable with remembering the one who the festival is named for and showing unconditional love to everyone, friend or stranger, and especially those with nothing. This is the author of Oliver Twist, after all. It surprised me that it was the jolly giant, the Ghost of Christmas Present, who showed the harshest judgement of Scrooge's callousness, quoting his own lines about surplus population, prisons and workhouses, back at him while his heart has been touched for the first time in a cold, cruel life. It is the Ghost of Christmas Present who reveals mankind's starving children: Ignorance and Want, in a scene often left out of adaptations. After all, Ignorance and Want are subjects that need to be addressed now, in Christmas Present, not in some dim and distant future.

Michael Gambon and classical singer
Katherine Jenkins are set to star with
Matt Smith in this year's Doctor Who
Christmas Special.

There are so many adaptations of the book: animated and live-action, colour and black-and-white, period and modern-day, that it would be impossible,or at least, highly impractical, to watch them all over one year. The first I ever saw was a very short version, Mickey's Christmas Carol, and I recently saw for the first time last year's Disney animated film with the voice of Jim Carrey. I'm not usually a fan of Carrey's acting - he tends towards melodramatic overacting in my opinion - but this was a remarkable adaptation, taken almost word-for-word and scene-for-scene from the book. Most of the moments that you might think were added for effect were in fact taken directly from Dickens' own words, and it would be a good one to watch for someone put off by Dickens' wordy style. (This is, after all, the author who takes a page to establish that "Marley was dead, to begin with," a page to illustrate that the French revolution occurred at a time much like any other and that people couldn't describe if it was good or bad.) There is an excellent modern-day version starring Ross Kemp, once a Mitchell from EastEnders, and even Doctor Who appears to be getting in on the act for its Christmas Special this year. But there is one version that I have to watch every December, that Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without: The Muppet Christmas Carol.

All together now...
"There goes Mr. Humbug,
There goes Mr. Grim.
If they gave a prize for being mean,
The winner would be him..."

*Actually, if you look in the shops, there are a lot of jumpers with reindeer motifs and suchlike.

The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters

When you read a lot of books, it is inevitable that many of them leave you disappointed. Occasionally, however, a book comes along that is close to perfect. I found that two years ago, unexpectedly, when I reached the end of A Tale of Two Cities. At the beginning of last year, Markus Zusak's The Book Thief left me speechless. And a few weeks ago, I discovered The Little Stranger (which has now been nominated for the Man Booker Prize, and I will be disappointed if it doesn't win.)

The Little Stranger is a ghost story of sorts, set just after the end of the Second World War, in Hundreds Hall, an old house whose family are losing control of it. The Ayres family have the house, but not the money to run it, and strange phenomena start occurring. The narrator is one Doctor Faraday, the son of one of the former maids at Hundreds who becomes friends with the family. As he becomes more intimate with the Ayres family: the widowed Mrs Ayres, her son Roderick and daughter Caroline.

The novel reads as though it were written at the time in which it is set. Waters not only uses the vocabulary of the era, but stylistic conventions. For example certain words are not spelled out, but contain dashes. Similarly, when characters mention a recent scandal, the name is omitted.

The central character in The Little Stranger is not Doctor Faraday, or any one of the Ayres family, but Hundreds Hall itself, which takes its place in a long line of old crumbling houses in the Gothic tradition, from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to Stephen King's Overlook Hotel. The atmosphere of the house begins as one of shabby nostalgia, a sorry memory of grander times. Waters skillfully evolves that atmosphere, through one of intrigue as Roderick starts to think that there is something wrong with the house. At first the signs are petty, seemingly harmless, such as furniture moving, and corresponding marks. These uncanny occurrences become more malevolent and when Dr Faraday notices dark marks all over the walls of Roderick's bedroom, spreading like mildew, like the "infection" Roderick feared. A creeping terror came over me as I read of those marks, which I knew corresponded with something terrible that would happen.

Sarah Waters never fully explains the "ghost," if ghost it is. Doctor Faraday, a man of science, stubbornly resists, in the face of evidence, that there is anything supernatural taking place at Hundreds Hall, and there is no moment of realisation. Traditionally in Gothic fiction, if the narrator is a scientist or a doctor, it is to add veracity to the tale - but Dr Faraday refuses to see what does not fit into his understanding. Waters through other characters suggests identities or explanations - Mrs Faraday believes the ghost of her late daughter Susan to be haunting her old house, and some of the clues seem to point to that, but others make no sense at all. Other characters suggest Roderick to be "haunting" Hundreds, or Caroline's repressed feelings. But Waters never gives an explanation. I started the novel wanting to know the answers, but when I reached the end I realised that a definite answer would be inevitably disappointing, while an open ending leaves the reader to come to their own conclusions, if they want to. Besides, I could not imagine a moment of realisation coming to Faraday - it would not fit with the novel or the character, and would be too tidy. Is "the little stranger" a straightforward ghost? Is it, like Poe's House of Usher, the house and the family, the one inextricable from the other? Is it some force influenced by one, or more, of the characters?

I read an interesting blog article by someone who goes by the name of "The Little Professor"  which suggests that the "Little Stranger" is Faraday himself. This was a possibility I had considered myself on reading the novel. After all, everything starts after Faraday starts spending time at Hundreds, and the idea of living at the Hall and restoring it to its former glory becomes an obsession with him - he becomes engaged to Caroline, but his love for her is unconvincing. It's the house he wants, not her.