octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

Much better than volume two, this is a return to the excellence of the first collection. There's barely any focus on the nastily uninteresting Zack, and the narrative returns to its essential heart: a family recovering from trauma. Or not recovering, as the case may be with Mrs. Locke. She's fallen into alcoholism, which - her husband was murdered and her children nearly so, and she was raped on top of it, so I can't really blame her for wanting the quick release of a drink - but her increasingly awful parenting is fucking up her kids even more. It's both horrible and sympathetic to watch, and the two older kids, especially, are having to take the brunt of it, all the time exploring the weird-arse house that's becoming ever more nightmarish. It's the fracturing family relationships that hold this comic series together, and the more the creators focus on those the better the series becomes.

There are six stories collected in this volume, and at least half of them are excellent. Two others are genuinely interesting, and I was indifferent to only one of them. (Even now, just having finished the book, I can't recollect even the tiniest thing about "No Connection", which if nothing else seems adequately named.) Of the excellent stories, two are Susan Calvin tales from Asimov's Robot series. I've a slight preference for "Evidence" over "Little Lost Robot", but I've read these two a number of times over the years and continue to enjoy them both. The standout, though, is "Breeds There A Man?" which has also held my attention over multiple reads, and is a take on the aliens-are-experimenting-on-us trope. Not a trope that I usually warm to, but its exploration here is so clever that the story is one I find hugely memorable.

This short story, from King's Everything's Eventual collection, is about a writer who goes to spend the night in a haunted hotel room. He does this - spends nights in haunted places - and it usually goes well for him as the haunted places he frequents generally aren't haunted at all, but of course this time it's different and things go badly. It's a likeable, mildly creepy short story, and the most interesting thing about it is the structure. Only the central third actually deals with time spent in the room, and the actual haunting is described in terms of a bad trip, with changing pictures on the walls, odd geometries, and strange voices. The first third is the hotel manager trying to warn the writer off, and the final third is the consequences of not listening to said warning - not being able to write again, and so forth. Perhaps it would be creepier if more time were spent in the room itself? But then again, perhaps not... it was actually the first third, that of the warning hotel manager, which I found the the most disturbing. The rest didn't quite match up.

For all I've heard about how much this novella was an influence on Bram Stoker when he was writing Dracula, I'd still never read it. Which was something of a loss for me, because it's fantastic. A little over-written in the purpleness of the prose, but that's something that can partly be attributed to the Victorian style, and partly, I think, as a means of talking around the fact that this is a love story between two women. I expect the culture of the time was not terribly into lesbian vampires, but it's hard to read Carmilla and interpret it any other way. That central relationship - the mutual fascination - is very well done and is the strongest point of the novella, covering up the coincidence and general gullibility that characterise the plot. But screw it, who's reading this for the plot anyway? Girl meets vampire, falls in love, death results. It is hardly an unexpected journey; there are no twists here, the plot is simple and exceedingly linear. And it doesn't matter, because - as I said - the relationship between Carmilla and Laura is so strong and so disturbing that it drowns out everything else.

A long unfinished poem by Coleridge that some argue to be an inspiration for Le Fanu's Carmilla, which I have just read. And yes, there is that shared central relationship between girls, both mirroring each other, and the fascination between them resting on Geraldine's monstrous nature just as it does with Carmilla's. What is also reminds me of, though, is Stoker's The Lair of the White Worm, because Geraldine is presented with a very serpentine imagery. If she's not a snake in a woman's skin I'd be frankly astonished, but then Coleridge only completed the first two sections of a planned five, as I understand it, and it's not like he's coming back to finish it off. Given that, I'm sticking with snake, and my guess is that Christabel's dopey enamoured dad was going to get bitten and come to a nasty, venomous end.

I think it's safe to say that the title isn't entirely accurate here. Of the eight short stories collected in this volume, a couple actually have ghosts in them. Others contain general supernatural nastiness, from demons to spiders to sack-and-toad monsters, sort of. They're all, however, very entertaining, although they do all come to seem a bit too similar to each other by the end. I happen to have read a couple of them before - the final story, "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas," is one that's always creeped me out. I don't even know why, really. If I were to describe it, I doubt it would seem that frightening, but it has one moment in it that's never failed to make me shudder. Of the stories collected here, I think that one's my favourite, although "The Mezzotint" is a close second.

These aren't stories that succeed in horrifying by virtue of gore. There's very little of that, and often there's barely any action at all. They all have similar protagonists - upper middle class male scholars, well educated individuals who find something odd in the course of their research. Frequently that research is archival, which gives them access to old and mysterious documents or artifacts but is not an especially glamorous vocation in itself. As I said, the stories can come across as much of a muchness, but they are so quietly well-written that an atmosphere of threat consistently develops regardless.

It's like reading a train wreck.

The thing is a disaster. Granted, it's 250+ years old and so the desperately overwrought style has thankfully gone out of fashion, but the plot is even more stunning than the language, in a what-the-hell-is-this? way. It is all ridiculously over the top, and I could not take it at all seriously, and yet it was such a disaster I was entertained despite myself. It's so terrible it's sort of circled round to fun.

I understand, back in the day, it was a shock to the literary system and spawned a number of imitations, so I suppose there's credit to be given for that. The first Gothic novel, if I understand it rightly? Usually these strike me as a mix of horror and romance, and perhaps in 1764 this was horrifying but I'm slightly more inclined to giggle. There's the odd uncanny bit, but really - how horrifying can the appearance of a giant helmet be, when on the second page it crushes a young and sickly bridegroom like the iron bonnet of doom that it is? And while the book ends in a marriage, it's not exactly a happy one. The wanted bride was killed off in a manner even more ridiculous than the bonnet of doom, and the remaining young people are joined in holy melancholy because they're the leftovers, or the left-alive, and it doesn't matter that the replacement bride is second best because they're to be miserable in their loss together, forever. I'm sorry, but romance that is not. I stand by my earlier judgement: it's a train wreck, but I am a morbidly curious creature, apparently, and train wrecks are clearly not beyond my powers of enjoyment.

Another short collection of ghost stories by James, and a follow-up to the first volume Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. I didn't enjoy this as much as the first book, but it was still an enjoyable read. I'm not sure if the lesser liking comes from lesser stories, though - my suspicion is that, well-written as they are, James' stories tend to blur together. They're all very similar, and while I noticed that similarity in the first volume, it was short enough - being only eight stories - that the weight of them together did not pall. Having read the seven stories here, so hard on the heels of that first book, they've begun to stodge together. I think, too, that some of the stories in this volume especially are much longer than they need to be. That said, I did still like it, even if I didn't get the reliable shudder that "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" gives me from any of the stories here. I think "The Tractate Middoth" is my favourite of this batch, followed by "The Rose Garden."

I got hold of this novella from the local library because it's on a list of haunted house stories I've been reading my way through. Thing is, it's not really a haunted house story. There's a murder, and a body in the well, and a guilty husband who becomes aware of some creepy shit involving rats - I hate rats - in his house. Yet, "twist" ending aside, it's not so much a haunting as it is a slow mental deterioration, I think. I never really got the impression that anything supernatural was actually happening - not that I'm complaining about that! Some of the finest horror stories in the world go this route (see: "The Yellow Wallpaper") and I'm always happy to read it because when it comes to horror, what humans do to others and themselves is often far scarier than any ghost or monster could be. And on that note, the pact here between father and son to get rid of wife and mother is, as it has to be, the starting event that twists and destroys all their lives.

That being said, neither mother, father, nor son was that likeable, although I did feel a bit sorry for the latter as he was a kid who was manipulated into murder. However, when the most sympathetic character is a literal cow, there's not a whole lot of emotional response can be drawn from the family tragedy on show here.

The concluding volume to Frame's autobiographical trilogy, and it's just as good as the others. This is the one where she escapes provincial New Zealand and heads to Europe, where she gets a literary agent, has some affairs, and finally gets the "you're not crazy you've just had crappy doctors" diagnosis. When I think of all the time this poor woman wasted in mental hospitals with incompetent care I am truly disturbed. How many other people suffered unnecessarily as she did?

I did find, to be honest, the ongoing metaphor of the Mirror City a little belaboured, but I was so glad to see her get a life for a bit that it didn't bother me that much.