The Charmed Life of Alex Moore - Molly Flatt

I've started listening to audiobooks from BorrowBox and Libby library apps, while on the bus to work. This was my most recent - a very Katieish blending of genres; half contemporary urban fiction, half psychological sci-fi. Six months ago, the titular Alex Moore took the leap from her dreary office job to become a trendy tech entrepreneur. Overnight, she became a brand- new person; braver, more confident, with a purpose - but also colder and weirdly disconnected from everything she was or knew before.

A weird series of events sends Alex to the Orkney Islands to take part in a research project, where she stumbles across huge secrets that have been hidden from the human race since the dawn of time... There was a lot about "Alex Moore" that fascinated me; complex ideas about what shapes our lives"; the lessons we learn, messages we believe and how our experiences dictate the way our personal "story" plays out. Author Molly Flatt asks uncomfortable questions about the rights and wrongs of sacrificing our past to move on from trauma, and how real, how fulfilling that can really be? The plot twists and turns, many unforeseen revelations making brilliant sense in hindsight.

However, I didn't like the ending. The consequences of Alex's final action didn't really make much sense to me, and one relationship took a turn that, though I saw it coming, felt forced and also crossed one of my red lines. Nope.

Also, please note that the unnamed (and fictional) Foyles bookseller who made an appearance early on did not reflect well on my profession. One might forgive her irritating fangirling at meeting a once-renowned author, but please note: no bookseller would ever - EVER - hand someone a book from a display table and tell them to lean on that when writing on a piece of loose paper. Nope nope nope.

The Shining - Stephen King

I first read Stephen King's The Shining at university, in my Gothic Fiction unit of my Literature degree. I came to the book with preconceptions, the famous bits of the Stanley Kubrick film. But although these scenes gave me a pretty good idea of where the story was going, none of the most memorable scenes of the film come from the book. I was familiar with Jack Nicholson's particular brand of crazy, and read the book just expecting it to build up to that moment. This time around, I took the book as it is, watching the struggle of Jack Torrance, who, if not exactly a good man, is a man trying to be good.

In case you're unfamiliar with the story, The Shining takes place at the Overlook Hotel, a popular Colorado tourist resort in the summer, but in the winter an undesirable place, cut off from the rest of the world. Jack Torrance takes a job as the winter caretaker, and moves in with his wife Wendy and five-year-old son, Danny, a bright young boy with a very unusual talent. Danny knows things that he shouldn't know, sees things that no one else can see, a gift that Mr Halloran, the Overlook's cook, refers to as "shining."

In a great gothic novel, the setting is a character in its own right, and the Overlook Hotel certainly is that, with its history of dark deeds and sinister deaths, and its isolation. It's one thing having characters separated from the outside world in centuries past, in ruined castles with dark, dank dungeons. But in America in the twentieth century, how isolated can the Torrance family really be? If you're the owner of a hotel in the Colorado mountains, and you're employing someone over the winter months, you'd make sure they can't get stranded there, right? The Torrances arrived at the Overlook by car, the hotel has a telephone, a radio and a snowmobile. But as the story goes on, Stephen King takes away these connections with the outside world, one by one, by a combination of natural and supernatural means.

The Overlook has a malevolent personality, and Danny's "shining" feeds it, make its powers stronger. The Shining contains several features of a conventional haunted-house story: the clanking elevator in the middle of the night, the topiary animals that move, the thing in room 217 - but its real terror is the way that it works with the Torrance family's own inner demons. And boy, does Jack Torrance have a lot of those! What marks Stephen King as a master storyteller rather than merely a horror writer, is the way that he makes us care for his characters before throwing terrible things at them to cope with. Jack Torrance is a troubled man: a recovering alcoholic with a deadly temper, clinging desperately to his pride. A former private school teacher, Jack lost his temper and his job, and what keeps him at the Overlook long after he and his family should have fled for their lives is his need to be provider and head of the family, his terror that this is his last chance and that if he messes this up he might never get another job. The Shining shows a family that has been under a lot of pressure, but is emerging from a dark period with a glimmer of hope - and then cruelly snatches that hope away in the story's terrifying finale. Jack's memories of his childhood and the darkness in his more recent past foreshadow the events in the book's finale, posing questions about addiction, inherited behaviour and fate. The real horror of The Shining is that it is unclear how much of what Jack becomes is natural, and how much is supernatural.

The Shining now has a sequel, Doctor Sleep, now available in paperback.

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

A bit spoilery.

After Amy Dunne disappears on her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband Nick is the first suspect. Though he maintains his innocence, desperate in his search to find out what has happened to his wife and to clear his name, the evidence appears damning. Chapters alternating between Amy's diary and Nick's contemporary narration reveal that the Dunne's marriage had been unhappy for a long time. In fact, it seems that Amy and Nick didn't even know each other any more. Their accounts of events in the past, and of each other's thoughts, moods and reactions, show a couple shockingly out of tune with each other.

These conflicting accounts keep the pages turning, switching the reader's allegiance between Nick and Amy, at least at first, while causing us to question if either party can actually be trusted. Nick, in particular, in the first half of the novel, showed the signs of being an unreliable narrator by withholding information, not only from the police, but also from the reader. His cell phone rings, and he turns it off, not telling who is calling, or mentioning it again - until the next time. He is questioned about an overheard argument - an argument he has not described. He claims to be a writer, and yet describes his father-in-law is "literally losing his head."

And then, halfway through, there is a momentous twist, and everything we think we have figured out about Amy, Nick and their marriage turns on its head. I was completely taken by surprise! The second half of the novel. The case plays out like a deadly game between ruthless, manipulative players taking turns. Both Amy and Nick reveal themselves to be highly unpleasant characters in a toxic relationship, and it's difficult to root for either one. The pages keep turning of their own accord as the story heads for a climax, and from a reader's point of view, you want something huge to happen, but you know it can't end well for both. Can there be a winner, or only losers?

Gone Girl starts off as a fairly straight-forward crime thriller, but turns out very different indeed: clever, but very twisted, dark and unsettling. You might want to read something cute and wholesome after this one.

The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson

What is a psychopath? That is the question at the heart of Jon Ronson’s book which is advertised as: “A journey through the madness industry.” What is a psychopath, how are psychopaths diagnosed, is there a cure, and what is the difference between psychopaths who are institutionalised, and the psychopaths at the top of the institutions: politics, business, entertainment and so on? These are just some of the questions Ronson explores in his study in madness.

In his research for this book, Ronson meets a man who feigned madness to try to escape a prison sentence – only to discover it is impossible to prove his sanity. In a chapter that reads more like the “madness literature” of Catch-22 or One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, every action “Tony” takes to show that, in fact, he is not insane, is taken as evidence that, in fact, he is. Or that he is not mad, but still a psychopath.

Ronson catalogues historic diagnoses and attempts at treating psychopathy – and his findings are surreal, sometimes disastrous, often seeming more like a skewed fiction than reality – interviews the psychologist responsible for coming up with the definitive psychopathy test, and starts applying the test to various people he meets: the mass-murderer, the top businessman with ruthless ambition and a love for firing people, the M15 agent-turned-conspiracy theorist. And yes, it certainly seems that the same traits that label some people as “psychopaths” are those that are encouraged in the people judged as “most successful.” Is society really run my psychopaths?

At the same time, Ronson argues, it is easy for people to be misdiagnosed, and especially in this day and age, any strangeness or eccentricity is easily – too easily – categorised as “mental disorders,” sometimes with disastrous results. Where do we draw the line? is the question we are left asking, in the fragile balancing act between “madness” and “sanity.”

I’m not a natural reader of non-fiction, but I found Ronson’s style to be easy-going, understandable considering I have no background in psychology, a curious and fascinating, if somewhat frightening insight into the world of diagnosing psychopathy.

Cuckoo, Julia Crouch

When Rose hears that her childhood friend has been widowed, she doesn't hesitate in inviting Polly and her children to stay. What else could she do? But Rose's husband Gareth isn't too happy about this. He's never liked Polly. She gives him the creeps. And certainly, Polly is not your normal grieving widow. She's never quite been normal, a former indie musician, with a history of drugs, eating disorders and other demons that have never quite gone away. But that's just Polly.

But the longer Polly stays under Rose's room, the more Rose feels she is losing her family. Her neatly ordered home and life starts falling to pieces. Could her old friend have anything to do with this?

Cuckoo is not the first book I've read where a newcomer to the household spreads an unhealthy influence, and seems to be gradually weaseling her way into the wife's position. Candia McWilliam's A Little Stranger works on similar themes, although in that case it was the nanny. Araminta Hall's Everything And Nothing looks like another version of the same story, but I haven't actually read that one and am only going by the cover blurbs.

I didn't automatically like any of the main characters, with the exception of Anna, Rose's elder daughter (and I suppose Flossie the baby.) Still, they are real characters, with flaws and struggles, dark secrets in the past, bad tempers, maybe too much drinking and smoking. Still, I grew to fear for Rose as her life started to unravel around her.

Polly was an interesting character, sometimes evil incarnate in a sexy dress, otherwise charm itself, and undeniably a very messed-up person. Sometimes it seemed she was so messed up that she couldn't help herself, and that there was only a certain amount of blame you could throw at her. Other times she was coolly manipulative, casting her glamour - and I mean this in all senses of the word - over Rose, her friends and relations, and eventually even the reader. As Polly began to cast her web, I was almost shouting at the characters, "How can you let her fool you?!" Yet in the end, even I was drawn in, a little. Even after all the evidence, even I wondered if, maybe, Polly was telling the truth and Rose was the one who was a bit mad.

When I started reading Cuckoo, it was with my editorial eyes, and at first I felt myself wanting to go through it with a red pencil. "Stop telling us and start showing! And for goodness' sake, stop telling us 'Rose thought this' and 'Rose thought that!'" Despite this, Crouch sets a really creepy, menacing atmosphere in her descriptions, each little detail leaving me worrying about what new disasters may unfold for Rose and her family. I feared for her.

Some aspects of the plot were visible for miles off, and I wondered how Rose herself could not see them sooner. But there were plenty of twists, too. Its ending was not a cosy, neat one, but if it had been, I would have felt cheated. This was not a neat story, but a messy one of damaged people trying to make their way the best they could.

If you enjoy this book, you may like:
The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly

Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Jeff Lindsay

Although I'd been vaguely aware of the Dexter books and the TV series based upon them, I'd not given them much thought until I saw a memorable Facebook status update from my sister:

Then, when I realised I hadn't brought a book to read in my lunchbreak at work, and had no interest in getting a magazine, I found an abandoned copy of the first book in the lunchroom, and, remembering Jenny's raving about the TV series, thought I'd give it a try.

I was vaguely aware, from what Jenny had told me and the book and DVD blurbs that Dexter Morgan was a forensic blood spatter analysis for the Miami police, a likeable man who happened to be a serial killer in his spare time - but who only kills the bad guys. The really bad guys. I came to the books unaware of any more of Dexter's character than this, and maybe had some idea that he was some sort of vigilante character whose primary objective was to bring villains to justice who had somehow slipped through the net. When I actually opened the book, it became clear that this view was mistaken. Dexter Morgan is primarily driven by the murderous urges and voices he calls "The Dark Passenger," and it is due to his moral code learned from his adopted father Harry that he has put the Dark Passenger to good use. Hey, if you must go around murdering people, you might as well go after the people who really deserve it, no?

It was difficult at first to get into Dexter's head, because he has no emotions - or so he claims - an outsider who observes humans as a species quite apart from himself, whose entire life is a performance to hide his secret, from his relationship with timid, damaged Rita and her children, to the decor of his house. And I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted to get into his head! Gradually, though, I became intrigued by this character, and Darkly Dreaming Dexter is a fascinating insight into the mind of a sociopath with some sort of moral code.

Then, more, I realised I was starting to like this self-confessed monster. His narration reflects his view as an outsider to his own life, facing drastic turns of events with an "ooh, would you look at that?" sort of curiosity and a dry, understated dark humour. What became just a handy distraction in the lunchroom hooked me and made me wonder how Dexter could possibly continue to hide his sinister pastime from his work colleagues including his sister Deborah, who are already starting to worry about how a blood spatter analyst could be such an expert in the serial-killer's psyche. Although I tend to prefer one-off novels to series, I'm alreadythinking, "Bother, only four more to go!" I've been discussing the story with Jenny who is a fan of the TV series, and so far we understand each other, but it seems that from series 2 onwards the books and TV show go their separate ways. Reviews claim that the TV DEXTER is one of the few instances of the adaptation being better than the original material - I shall have to investigate this for myself, I think. Purely for research and comparison, of course. And that way, I've got twice as many Dexter stories to keep my dark side entertained.