Review: A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆
Date Read: May 27 to 28, 2016
Recommended by: Stephen King
Recommended to:

This is the kind of book you have to finish in one sitting or else it will haunt you until you do. I read it on Stephen King’s recommendation precisely because he said it scared him, which I found amusing and that was the reason it stayed on my radar. If not for Stephen King’s comment, I mostly definitely wouldn’t have picked it up because there wasn’t anything about Paul Tremblay or the blurb that made it stand out or look more interesting than other horror new releases.

I don’t read horror anymore, not because it’s scary, but because there hasn’t been anything new in the genre since Stephen King. i guess you could say that about any genre and have whole libraries of books to back you up. For me, though, the genre stopped being interesting when I realized every horror book I picked up was basically a Stephen King knock-off. Moreover, I don’t like contemporary fiction or the contemporary-ness of the writing in most horror stories, and I especially don’t like stories about domestic upheaval, decrepit old houses, and the ol’ possession or mental illness theme, all of which this book had. The irony is not lost on me.

The basic story is this: there are two timelines–now and 15 years from now. The book opens in the future with Merry revisiting the old house where she and her family lived during her sister Marjorie’s illness. What had happened to her family, particularly her sister, has since become an urban legend. Now Merry finally wants to tell her side of the story.

Like most possession stories, this one began with a series of weird things happening inside the house that no one in the family could account for, and they got steadily worse as Marjorie’s illness progressed. What further compounded the situation was her father losing his job and turning to religion, Marjorie’s medical bills piling up, the family falling further into debt, all the while Marjorie got worse and the weird things in the house kept happening. The family had to turn to exorcism as a last resort to save Marjorie.

The twist to this exorcist retelling is the introduction of a “documentary”/reality TV show. Because the family was financially strained, they had agreed to let a TV crew film a “documentary” detailing Marjorie’s condition in their home, and they had to live with the show’s cast and crew during the filming. Again, all the while Marjorie descended further into madness, which made her condition worse. 

I thought the fake documentary was a clever way to make a familiar plot seem more modern. It added an interesting, yet much needed cringe-worthy, feel to the story that speaks to this day and age of exploitative reality TV.

This book leaves you with a parting question: was what happened to Marjorie a deteriorating psychological disorder or was it supernatural? There’s no clear answer and there’s enough for you go back and forth and second guess yourself.

It’ll keep you up at night, that’s for sure.

* * * * *

A big thanks to William Morrow for holding the GR giveaway where I won a copy of this book.

Review: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, read by Tom Mison

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ (for the narration)
Date Read: March 30 to 31, 2015
Read Count: lots
Recommended by:
Recommended for: fans of the show Sleepy Hollow

So good. Haunting and whimsical. Tom Mison has the perfect voice and intonation for this story (because he is Ichabod Crane). Although the story is told in third-person, Mison remains in character from start to finish as the Ichabod Crane he plays in the show. So if you like him in the show, then listening to him read the story is exactly like having Ichabod recount the story of his life in Sleepy Hollow. What’s unique about Mison’s narration is that he presents Icabod as a layered, nuanced character who is full of wonder and ahead of his time. As a character trapped in his time, Ichabod must abide by society’s prim and proper lifestyle, but what he really wants is the freedom to explore. So Sleepy Hollow suited him just fine. It’s a small secluded town full of mystique and “alleged” hauntings. Everything about the locale and history interested him and brought out a sense of wonder.

What I like most about Mison’s reading is how close it is to how I see Ichabod Crane. I’ve always imagined him as a bumbling professor from the backwoods with a morbid youthful glee that’s at odds with Washington Irving’s stiff, puritanical writing style. There’s just something about the character that’s curious and mischievous, but that side of him isn’t shown much due to the prudish writing. At the beginning of the story, Ichabod was a learned man of logic and science, though not entirely adverse to witchcraft or the supernatural; he was, after all, full of wonder and ahead of his time. When the natural and the supernatural coalesced in Sleepy Hollow, however, he couldn’t separate fact from fiction and thus began to lose that sense of wonder. It’s one thing to believe in the supernatural and entertain the idea of facing it head on while never encountering it directly; it’s another thing to see it for yourself and having it shatter your romantic illusions. The change is subtle and gradual, but deeply felt in Mison’s narration. And for that, five stars.

Review: The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Date Read: November 30 to December 03, 2014
Read Count: 1
Recommended by:
Recommended for:

The movie is scarier, mostly because of the visuals, but also partly because it lets you assume that perhaps whatever possessed Regan MacNeill may not really be the devil but an unknown entity. The book, however, makes no allowances for alternative interpretations. It is Satan without a doubt, and I think that actually lessens the chilling effect, that the culprit is so obvious.

Perhaps evil is the crucible of goodness… and perhaps even Satan–Satan, in spite of himself–somehow serves to work out the will of God.

Other factors that also lessen the story are the overtly religious tone in the writing and long-winded religious explanations of signs and symptoms Regan exhibited. What makes them long-winded is the way in which they supposedly tie into a religious narrative, specifically that of Roman Catholicism. Many people find the religious aspects of the story frightening, and I can certainly see why, but for me, I find them too conveniently laid out for a story about the depths of evil.

So I couldn’t help but come up with a couple of fairly reasonable explanations for Regan’s deteriorating health and mental state. Medicine has advanced in leaps and bounds since the 1970’s when this book was written, and thus I think it’s safe to say that medical testings at the time didn’t yield that many valuable answers. So let’s look at Regan’s health under a different light.

Instead of demonic possession, here are a few things I think could have caused Regan to go off the rails:

• severe food allergy (probably gluten)
• toxic mold in the house (particularly in her bedroom)
• some kind of long-term poisoning (I’d rule out lead, although it explains Regan’s behavior as she deteriorated, it would have shown up on lab results)
• vitamin deficiency

I lean more toward the severe food allergy angle because celiac disease, if left untreated according to people who develop it later in life, can lead to neurological deterioration and all sorts of skin and gastrointestinal problems, which is in line with Regan’s symptoms as described in the book. Many of these people went undiagnosed for a long time simply because they had no idea what was wrong with them, and they continued to consume gluten on a regular basis while it built up in their system, and over time the amount of gluten they amassed caused all sorts of health and mental problems. Some even thought they were going insane–they actually said it felt like they were losing their minds (Jennifer Esposito’s story). So perhaps Regan wasn’t possessed; perhaps she had celiac disease, but there had been no way to test for it at the time.

I don’t mean to sound like a cynic though. I am open to the possibility that all sorts of supernatural things exist and like to go bump in the night, and that’s why I enjoy the SF/F genre so much. But this particular book makes it too difficult for me to buy into the conclusion that the culprit can’t be anything but demonic possession.

Of course I’m not a medical professional, just someone who knows a bit about food allergies and likes to poke holes in popular books. If you are a medical professional, feel free to correct me and/or add your own take on demonic possessions.

Review: The Sketch Book: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆
Date read: October 27 to 31, 2013
Read count: 3

Not as scary as I remember, but still a classic October read.

Over the years, I’ve read, watched, and listened to a number of headless horseman retellings of Irving’s tale, and while I enjoy seeing a dated text brought to contemporary settings and revised with contemporary language, the scare-factor of the original story is either watered down or gone altogether.

As much as I enjoy rereading this story collection, the experience isn’t as good as when I first read it all those years ago at a time when I knew very little about genre tropes and urban legends and enjoyed the simple experience of being scared of things that went bump in the night

— — — — —

Sleepy Hollow, the new TV series on Fox, is pretty good. I watched the first 5 episodes in just one rainy weekend and they were exactly what I was looking for: a mix bag of modern crime mystery and thriller set against an end-times conspiracy story arc (that will span the season) and just the right amount of urban legend thrown in.

I was inspired to reread Irving’s Sleepy Hollow after watching the show. Even though the two have very little in common–Ichabod Crane and urban legends–it’s interesting to offset one against the other while comparing and contrasting tones and tropes.

Review: The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft

Rating: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Date read: August 29 to 30, 2013
Read count: 1

For those who enjoy rifling through old research notes, piecing together missing data, making sense of the big picture, and then being left hanging at the end.

I’m kidding, of course. The best part of any horror story is that it leaves you hanging. No explanation, no resolution, no sense of closure.

This story is told in a series of personal accounts in which the narrator pieces together what he thinks was the cause of his granduncle’s mysterious sudden death, speculating that the late uncle’s mysterious anthropological work most likely had something to do with it. He also speculates that the death is part of a larger ongoing mystery that has to do with a legendary mythical creature.

Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean with wings… is how I picture the Cthulhu.

It was a slow read for me due to too much telling and not enough showing. Much of the mystery’s pull is placed on the fear of the unknown, which in this case is “the fear of foreigners and their foreign-ness.”

What this story boils down to is a paranoid account of ethnocentric anxieties and xenophobic psychosis.

Original review can be found here.

Review: Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King

Rating: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
Date read: August 28 to 29, 2013
Read count: 2

Every-day life in a small town in Maine is disrupted when a werewolf comes tearing through, literally. He appears every full moon for a few months straight and takes out a couple people while putting everyone in town on edge. His targets and victims are random… at first. The only thing connecting them is that they’re alone when attacked. You’re led to believe that it’s a mindless animal… but is it really?

This was my first Stephen King book. I read it when I much younger, probably too young to have been browsing through the Stephen King shelves, and I remember really liking it. I still like it, although not as much due to having read better werewolf tales since then.

Half of the fun in reading this story is figuring out who or what the werewolf is, and the other half is Stephen King’s depictions of rural small-town life in hysterics. Since it’s been 100*F where I live for the past week, I thought I’d try the audio to enjoy its wintry depths~. (There’s actually no depths to speak of. The story is very much a linear narrative of a werewolf terrorizing the townsfolk.)

The book:
You get a better sense of the town, scenery, and individual characters in writing. Since this is a novella, events kick off on the first page and the bodies pile up quickly. What I like most about this book is it doesn’t take hundred of pages to set the plot in motion.

The movie:
Pulpy, campy, and so 80s. You know who the werewolf is when he is introduced in human form. Even if I hadn’t read the book, I would have been able to pick out the culprit. On the other hand, there’s Terry O’Quinn. With hair. (I don’t remember exactly. I think he had hair here.)

The audio:
The narrator is good. Make sure you have the 80s version though. It’s funnier than what I was expecting. A few quirky descriptions of the townsfolk made me laugh out loud.

—     —     —     —     —

I’d like to read more Stephen King, but I don’t like the way he begins each book, sets up events, or introduces characters. All of this usually takes up half the book, and by chapter 7, I’m usually half-asleep with the book on my face. For these reasons, I find it difficult to settle into his stories and I always struggle with the narration until the main plot takes off. Once it takes off, though, the book is difficult to put down, but everything until that point is a sleepy uphill slog.

Original review can be found here.

Review: The Burn Palace by Stephen Dobyns

Rating: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Date read: April 13 to 20, 2013
Read count: 1

Weird stuff happening in a small town, but everything comes together in the end in a believable conclusion (of sorts). That alone makes it worth the read.

Also, this book has hints of Stephen King… actually, it’s more like a bouillon cube of Stephen King. It has Stephen King flavorings, but stewed in a more fortified crock pot (if that makes any sense).

The familiar: sleepy small town, gossipy towns folk, gifted (read: not annoying) children, supernatural happenings, unusual deaths, mental illnesses, and animals with violent streak. What’s different from the usual Stephen King fare is you get a bird’s eye view of the the town and its inhabitants and you get to visit every character’s life (main player’s) and see events unfolding from his/her POV. Another thing that’s different is the horror element. Often it’s more humorous than scary. The central mystery has a real, not supernatural, culprit, and the conclusion is plausible and tidy, which you don’t often see in Stephen King stories.

I can’t shake the feeling that if this story was set in the 60s or 70s, it would have made more of an impact on the towns people and there’d be more of an ominous feel to the central mystery and deaths. Modern setting, technology, and crime-solving methods take away from the otherworldly feel of this sleepy town and its strange happenings.

Original review can be found here.

Review: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Date read: October 15 to November 27, 2012
Read count: 1

Choosing to take on this book is like agreeing to sign a contract you haven’t read. Start reading this book and you’ve just signed the dotted line because now you’re playing by the book’s rules, and there are many. You won’t be just reading, you’ll actually have to do things with the book. There are activities, and the book takes “engaging with the text” to a whole new level. Think of it as a journey…into a haunted house…where there are no exits. So relax and enjoy the ride.

I love this book, gimmicks and typography and all, and I can’t explain why. Experimental writing that toys with post-modern mind games, magical realism, and a “haunted” house with a running commentary from a madman in the footnotes is as weird as weird fiction gets. And yet I have no idea why I like it so much. By all accounts, I should find it obnoxious because I can’t stand gimmicky books, but somehow gimmicks work for this book.

The story, on the surface, is told in one narrative–the main narrative? there are several–as a classic haunted house / ghost story. Weird, indecipherable things start happening and keep happening inside this house and the family is slowing driven mad with each incident. There are stairs leading to the basement that never reach the bottom, instead they go on forever into the depths of what that’s beneath the house. There are doors that appear one day and disappear the next, only to appear again later. There are other doors that lead to different rooms in completely different parts of the house. Then there are doors that lead nowhere. The house seems to expand on the inside every day, yet it still looks the same on the outside. The family is, by all accounts, gradually losing their marbles. And then there’s that growling noise. Is it in the walls? ceiling? floors? beneath the never-ending stairs? Where is that thing coming from?

The style of writing and format, as well as placement, of the text are chaotic which perfectly reflect the family’s gradual descent into madness and the house’s “true” form gradually taking “shape.” There are words literally falling off the page half way into the book, and there are sentences wrapped around each other and falling off the page, and then there are pages and pages of text printed backward and upside down and vertically. The words themselves are so chaotic, it’s amazing they can even tell a story, let alone a scary one.

But if you take away all the weird incidents, madness, scattered words, and even the house itself, what you find underneath it all is a story about the mystery of love–and loss?–as the author once said in an interview I read somewhere but now can’t recall. Once I saw his answer, everything about this book made sense–well, made more sense. Even the weirder parts of the story made sense–well, made more sense than they did before. I don’t claim to know what this book is about, only that it’s an interesting vacation from your usual reads.

Hard to imagine, but this story is a story about love. Not a love story, but a story about love. (None of this will make any sense until you read the book. Obviously.)

Original review can be found here.

Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Date read: November, 2009
Read count: 1

* * * spoilers below * * *