octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I've seen this play performed, but I've never actually read it until now, and it's just as funny on the page as it is on the stage. The thing is, it's entirely ridiculous, but the humour is so sharp, and the whole thing so enormously quotable, that the ridiculousness becomes part of the appeal. Granted, it's been years since I saw the play, and I only retained a vague sense of plot, but I was surprised on nearly every page by sentences I recognised; sentences that have become so much a part of culture that they've just clearly stuck through osmosis if nothing else. What an achievement, to create something so enormously quotable! Anyway, it's clever and silly and enormously entertaining, and reading it makes me want to see it performed again just so I can hear the rest of the audience laughing with me.

Earlier this afternoon I read Lucy Felthouse's Timeless Desire, a novelette that mashed up romance and a haunted house. I liked it, so I had high hopes for a second novelette from her that did the same thing. Unfortunately it doesn't quite match up for me.

There's nothing wrong with the writing or anything. It's quite competent. I think, though, that if I'd gone into it expecting a plain romance I might have rated this a little higher. However, the reason I came across Felthouse in the first place is that I'm reading my way through a Goodreads list of haunted house fiction. (What can I say: I love my haunted houses.) And Weekend at Wilderhope Manor was on that list, and the book's blurb indicates that this is a haunted house story... but it's not, really. I mean, there are a few ghostly details in the background, creaking floorboards and the like, and one very brief interlude where one of the protagonists trips in the house's haunted maze, but honestly, it's marginal. Mostly this is an excuse for Stephanie and Jenny to fuck as often as possible. Which, good for them, they're fun characters, but I feel like I was promised a haunted house story and didn't get it. What's the point of setting your story in a haunted house if you don't exploit that setting to the fullest? The balance isn't quite right, is what I'm saying - Timeless Desire integrated the ghost and the romance much more effectively.

Very mixed feelings about this one. The prose was smooth and easy to read, and (with a very few exceptions) I thought the relationships and characters were well-drawn. I really liked the set-up, too. I know that having your protagonists be paranormal investigators is a fairly common thing in the haunted house genre, but this was an entertaining example of it, with a lot of focus on the people and history involved. It was also genuinely creepy - I was reading this late at night and thirty pages from the end decided "Nope, the rest can wait til daylight!"

So why, with so much to like about this book, have I only given it two stars? Well, there's one very good reason for this, and it's the immensely irritating romantic subplot between Ginger and Adam. First, I sincerely disliked Adam. His introduction made him seem so unpleasant that even after a time skip and some maturing on his part (though not much, he was still arrogant, controlling, and condescending, three very unlikeable traits) his character couldn't recover for me. Hated him, hated Ginger was so stupid as to get involved with him again. I seriously groaned every time focus would shift from the scary house to these two... and that's not even getting into the come-from-nowhere climax, when Ginger's random ex pops up in the most unconvincing of ways.

In summary: everything about the house and the haunting is likeable, entertaining horror. It's just constantly dragged down by the relationship between the leads. Without it, this book would be a solid three stars from me.

The prose is as uninteresting as the characters.

Honestly, this did not work for me at all. It read very much like an early draft - an impression reinforced by the fact that the ebook I purchased was positively littered with grammatical errors and typos. This really should have been proofread before it was published. The bigger problem, however, was that there's just too much going on. This is a novella of just over 30,000 words (so Smashwords tells me), which means that there's limited space to tell a story... and there's just so much thrown at the wall here. It seemed like every couple of pages there was some weird new twist, not very organically integrated with the rest of the text, and there just wasn't time to do any of it justice. As a result it felt frantically disjointed - not in a good way - and in places confused. The same thing happened with the related short story included at the end of the volume, which was frankly incomprehensible.

Oh, I like this! Nicely written, though it might be creepier if I weren't so fascinated by the odd geometries going on in the house. Basically, there's something reminiscent of Escher happening in the hallways and cupboards of the house Emma's just inherited, and her kid gets briefly stuck in a weird corridor. And I enjoyed it, but it does feel rather like the opening chapter to a novel instead of a short story proper.

I'd totally read the novel, though.

It started out better than that rating indicates, I think, but the final third really didn't work for me. I'm a big horror fan, but for me the most frightening horror comes from suggestion, not the hack-hack-gore model where shock after bloody shock are piled on top of each other. There were points towards the end where it all got so over the top that the scare factor actually decreased. It didn't help that hardly anyone investigating this haunted house was likeable, and the main investigator was the most unlikeable of the lot. When I don't care if the house destroys a single one of the characters, that's something of a problem.

That said, I note that, at the end of the book, the about the author section said that Guest has actually worked at the house, manning the BBQ booth. I didn't realise Reindeer Manor was an actual place! But apparently it's run as an amusement park, in much the same fashion as Spookers here in New Zealand, or so I imagine. And the creepy history of the house that's related in the story is based on truth, or so the Reindeer Manor website tells me. Given this setting, I wish I could find the novel more appealing... but I bought the series all together, so perhaps the rest of the volumes in it will improve.

I read and reviewed the two books making up this collection separately, so this is basically just for my own records. The collection rating is an average of the individual ratings. I gave Tales From Earthsea five stars, because it was just amazingly good. Le Guin's prose there was so smooth, and so very polished, without a single wasted word. (She's really a marvel of economy compared to a lot of fantasy writers!) Then, too, that short story collection was very much themed about exploring the intersection of magic and gender, which is something that appeals tremendously to me. The Other Wind wasn't quite as good in my opinion, and I gave it four stars. As much as I love Le Guin's prose, the stripped-back nature of it can sometimes dampen my emotional response: the wall and the liberation of the dead didn't quite hit me as hard as it could have. Then again, no-one has managed that particular story element like Philip Pullman, so The Other Wind suffers just a little by comparison.

Deeply, blindingly original. Astonishing, even. I didn't think I was going to enjoy it, and the first hundred pages were a bit of a slog, but it dragged me in until, almost despite myself, I was fascinated.

It's not entirely perfect - some of the (extremely lengthy) list footnotes struck me as self-indulgent show off-ery - but the whole overshadows the nitpicks.

Wikipedia tells me that Charles Dickens, who originally published this in serial form, found it enormously wordy. Which is true, but it is also the pot calling the kettle black. Apparently he disliked in Gaskell's work what was so predominant in his own. Unlike Dickens, I did enjoy this, wordy as it is. Honestly, it could have been cut down by a third.

It's not many romances that highlight labour relations, however. Set in a cotton mill - presumably contemporary with Gaskell's life - the focus is on the relationship between mill owners and workers, with strikes having a central role. There's a genuine bleakness in the life of many of the workers, with starvation and suicide present, which makes them highly sympathetic. It also makes Margaret, the protagonist, more sympathetic, as she's on their side - and honestly, she's initially such a snob that she really needed to be sympathetic to get any sympathy from me. Gaskell, it's clear, tries very hard to give equal weight to the competing concerns of capital and labour, but she's only able to do so because the mill owner, Thornton (who is unsurprisingly also the love interest) is himself softened by his experiences to become a decent boss... by the standards of the time, anyway. It's equally clear, however, that the other mill owners are awful, and so reconciliation within the system is only really possible on an individual level. Which is a far less hopeful ending for labour in general than it is for the romance. It's worth reading, however, for Higgins alone, who, representing the workers, is the most interesting character of the lot.