Sunday, February 23, 2025

4. Julia

By Peter Straub

I had assumed the 1975 film, The Haunting of Julia, would be hard to find, but to my surprise it appeared on Tubi last autumn.  I really liked it. 

 

The credits revealed that is was adapted from a novel by Peter Straub, which I promptly ordered (to arrive at my MILs as it’s much easier to find vintage books in the US).  Even Olman remarked on the cool cover.  Turned out this was Peter Straub’s first novel.  I had read Ghost Story a long time ago, so long ago that it didn’t even have its own entry.


I can see how Straub had perfected his craft after he had published Julia because I found Ghost Story to be a very effective supernatural horror novel.

 

Julia is modern gothic with a major slathering of maternal horror (right up my alley).  There’s even a séance as Julia’s sister-in-law Lily belongs to an informal spiritualist group.  Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

 

The titular character is an American heiress in London who has been struggling with the aftermath of her daughter’s death. The novel begins with Julia shortly after being released from hospital (we later learn her husband Magnus had committed her).  Julia has just purchased an expensive house near Holland Park in Kensington and is about to move in.. without Magnus. There's a lot of unresolved issues in their marriage, to say the least. For one, Julia blames Magnus for the death of their nine year old daughter, Kate.  She views her leaving him as a separation while Magnus has never given his blessing on the matter and tries to convince her to come back.

 

We learn later how Kate died – from choking on a piece of meat and from Julia’s desperate attempt at a botched tracheostomy.  It's interesting to note that the Heimlich maneuver may not have been common knowledge at that time (the novel was published in 1975). 

 

Right away, there's something off about the house on 25 Ilchester Place. Even though London was experiencing an unusually hot summer, the heat is always cranked way up, even though Julia was sure she had turned it off.  Later in the narrative, as the crazy shit ramps up, the wallpaper starts peeling and the furniture begin to warp under the stifling heat, which I thought was a nice touch.

 

But at the start, the strange occurrences are very minimal, ie. Julia keeps seeing a girl who looks so much like her dead daughter, hearing strange sounds in the night, etc. That is, until the fateful night of the séance, when the medium Mrs Fludd detects a malevolent entity in Julia’s house.  Mrs Fludd tells Julia she must leave the house, move back to the States even, though she won’t say why -- a convenient plot device as this prompts Julia to investigate the history of the house, and she discovers some terrible things.  Of course, no one else believes an evil entity is haunting Julia and whoever does simply ends up getting killed!

 

The book makes a connection between Julia and the previous homeowner, Heather Rudge, which was omitted in the film adaptation.  Both women are American, and both had daughters who died by their mother’s hand.  Julia and Kate had a loving relationship while Heather’s relationship with Olivia was somewhat fraught, shall we way, due to the kid being a sadistic psychopath!  This explains Julia’s inexplicable desire to purchase the house (the malevolent spirit of Olivia was exerting its influence on her).  In the film, Julia's impulsive purchase of the house was a way to liberate herself from her controlling husband.

 

There’s also another connection in the novel that's not covered in the film.  When Magnus was a young bachelor, he was Heather’s lover, and the book strongly implies that Magnus had fathered Olivia.  This makes sense in terms of a motive to explain why the vengeful spirit of Olivia has set her sights on Julia (and why Kate and Olivia look so much alike). In the movie, the spirit was simply evil because Olivia was a psychopathic bitch who enjoyed torturing little kids when she was alive and now it wants to drive Julia insane.

 

Some other creative differences between movie vs book:

 

The movie is called The Haunting of Julia (or Full Circle in the UK) – both of which are better titles than the one given to the novel.

 

In the movie, Mark is a working-class hipster who’s been friend-zoned by Julia (not the adopted black-sheep brother of Magnus and Lily).  In the movie, Mark is an ally of Julia and ends up being electrocuted by an antique lamp while he’s taking a bath.  In the book, Julia harbors an attraction to Mark, her brother-in-law, and turns to him for refuge when she finds out that the middle-aged members of Olivia’s old gang have been murdered.  Mark ends up leaving Julia in an even more fragile mental state after he rapes her and leaves her alone in his shabby apartment.  The Lofting siblings are a rather despicable lot.

 

The movie also sets the narrative during autumn/winter, which I found much more fitting in terms of a modern gothic atmosphere (and I loved how Mia Farrow wore lots of woolens).  I can see why Straub wanted an unusually hot summer with the heat, like the entity, exerting an oppressive force on Julia, but I prefer a more chilly autumnal setting. 

The movie had an ambiguous ending (spoiler alert!).  Was Julia really haunted, or was it all due to mental deterioration? I really thought that when Julia opened her arms, Olivia was going to possess her, as the film seemed to be setting it up for that. Seeing Julia dead with her throat slit and the credits rolling with her slumped in the armchair, I didn't know what to think. Who ended her life? Was it the ghost or Julia herself?

According to Kier-La Janisse, "the ghost's murderous hands are in actuality the protagonist's own". So was it Julia who had killed her husband then, because she blamed him for their daughter's death? Did Julia really kill herself out of guilt and grief? The lack of historical context between Julia and Olivia in the film made it seem that Julia’s demise was mainly due to her mental disintegration.

In the book, we see how Olivia’s power over Julia grows and as Julia comes to the dawning realization that she was the one who killed Kate, she climbs to the roof of the house on 25 Ilchester Place and plummets to her death.  The ending of the novel was rather sudden and disappointing (see next paragraph), so I much prefer the film’s ambigious ending over the book.

 

In the movie, Magnus dies when he sneaks into Julia’s house (something causes him to fall down the stairs to the basement and his throat gets cut by a broken bottle).  In the book, Magnus lives.  In fact, Mark takes off for California, while Magnus and Lily end up with Julia’s money after her death and they (and the ghost) get everything they want.  Evil triumphs!

 

Here’s an apt summary of Peter Straub’s Julia which also encapsulates my own feelings about the ending:

Julia is a weak, easily-led heiress (always a good combo) who falls under Magnus’s spell, marries him, and endures a semi-abusive marriage for about 10 years. They both love their daughter, who dies tragically, leaving Julia to run away from the shambles of her life. She buys a house that’s haunted by the spirit of a little girl, and bad things start happening. Magnus’s family is terrible – his brother and sister try to stay on Julia’s good side to stay close to her money. The brother tries to sleep with her, the sister tries to talk her into going back to Magnus. The build-up is great. Things start swirling around, getting more eerie and more dangerous, Julia finally convinced that she’s not losing her mind and there really are spirits in the house. I kept waiting for her to triumph, to stop Magnus, to put the ghosts to rest, to solve the puzzle. Instead, she gets drugged and raped by Magnus’s brother, killed by the ghost, and the in-laws get all her money. WHAT.

I liked the movie better.

 

Thursday, January 02, 2025

1. When Darkness Loves Us

By Elizabeth Engstrom

I first heard of Elizabeth Engstrom in Monster, She Wrote where she was featured in a chapter titled “Monstrosity in the Mundane".

 

Her bio is interesting. Born Betsy Lynn Gutzmer, Engstrom didn’t start writing seriously until well into her thirties when she signed up for a writing workshop in Hawaii. She had lived a full life – she acquired a Masters degree in applied theology and had her own advertising agency, which she sold to embark on a career in fiction writing.  She was also a wife and mother.

 

I was happy to find a new copy of When Darkness Loves Us when I ordered via Abes Books and didn’t really clue into the fact that it was a special reissue when Olman saw me reading it and asked, is that a Paperbacks from Hell?  Turns out When Darkness Loves Us was featured in Grady Hendrix’s book, Paperbacks from HellLooks like Hendrix has given some forgotten or out of print horror books a second life.

 

The reissue even features the cover art by Jill Bauman that graced the cover of the original 1986 Tor paperback.  After finishing the book, I realize how fitting the illustration was -- an old-fashioned doll with a cracked face and a gaping hole where the nose had been broken off.

 

I found it interesting that in Monster, She Wrote, Kröger and Anderson omitted the fact that before Engstrom became a wife, mother and writer, she was a recovered alcoholic.  In Hendrix’s intro, he simply stated that for ten years, Gutzmer was a drunk.  How Engstrom described her past life gave some interesting insight into the kind of stories she wrote:

“I hung with the underbelly of society”, she says. “And the worse they were, they better I felt about myself. I had friends in really low places, and they were the people I was comfortable with. No real identity, living in the shadows, only coming out at night.”

 

According to Hendrix, in Engstrom’s stories, monsters are created, not born.  Monsters also lurk among us and within us.

 

I really wanted to like When Darkness Loves Us.  It was one of the first stories she had developed when she attended Theodore Sturgeon’ workshop.  The premise was interesting, written like a dark fairy tale and barely the length of a novella, it's not more than sixty-odd pages long.  It begins with pregnant sixteen year old Sally Ann, lustfully admiring her young husband from afar while he’s driving a tractor out on their farm.  She decides to explore an abandoned tunnel and ends up being trapped underground for many years.

 

Sally Ann learns to survive in constant darkness, and gives birth to her son (his name is Clint!), who grows up in the cave without ever seeing daylight.  When he’s old enough to be on his own, Sally renews her desire to go to the top, even though her son tries to convince her to stay.  At this point, I stopped reading and tried to imagine where Engstrom was going to go with this.  I imagined Sally would somehow escape and be discovered by her family.  Her reunion with her husband would probably have unexpected consequences, but she would end up abandoning her son.  Even though Clint never wanted to leave the cave, he goes up top in search of his mother.  He becomes the monster in the cave who terrorizes Sally Ann and her family, but only during the night because the sunlight frightens him.

 

But the actual story is much darker and twisted.  The real horror is not being fully welcomed back by your own family because they thought you were dead and have moved on.  On top of that, you’ve become a shrunken twisted version of yourself with missing teeth and blackened lips.

 

I felt that the abrupt shift in POV to Sally’s son when he’s left alone in the darkness didn’t work for me.  Even though it was disturbing to read his innermost thoughts and actions, I felt that this shift was primarily done to shock the viewer with his dark fantasies.  I felt the story would have been stronger had it kept the focus on Sally Ann as it was her story.  Basically, Sally Ann soon learns that she had been gone for twenty years!  So her son wasn't a boy but a man!  Her less attractive sister ended up marrying her husband and they have children of her own.  Sally Ann ends up kidnapping her youngest niece and brings her back to the caves to introduce to her 20 year old son!  

 

The blurb at the back of the book was also terribly written and inaccurate:  Sally Ann and Martha. Two women, searching for love. Finding terror.

 

It made it seem that both Sally Ann and Martha are in the same story.  I thought that Beauty Is… was the name of a new chapter that would continue from When Darkness Loves Us because the last chapter did not have a proper ending.  When I realized it was an entirely different story, I had to re-adjust my expectations.

 

Compared to When Darkness Loves Us, Beauty Is… was 150 pages, more than double the length.

 

Beauty Is… wasn’t as creepy, but it was a good slow-burner and much more effective than When Darkness… I felt that the order should’ve been reversed.  Beauty Is… was the stronger and more developed story.  What they have in common is the rural setting.  Both protagonists grew up on the farm and are either innocent or naïve to the ways of the world before they become damaged by a traumatic event or circumstance.

 

In Beauty Is…, Martha is a middle-aged simpleton living alone in the farmhouse she grew up in.  She goes into town to get some supplies and in her interactions with the townsfolk, it seems that they all look out for her.  The chapters alternate between Martha and her mother Fern, who like Sally Ann, also married a farmer at a young age.  Shortly into her marriage, Fern discovered she has the gift of healing, when she saves the life of a neighbour who had a terrible accident.  Fern soon becomes revered and respected as the town healer, but Harry, her god-fearing husband is suspicious of her gifts, as he thinks that all this good fortune is going to come back and bite them.  Sure enough, their daughter Martha is born without a nose.  Fern loves her anyway but Harry is frightened and disgusted by the sight of his baby.  The real horror is not Martha’s deformity, but how she is treated by her small-minded, heartless father.  As the narrative unfolds, we learn that Martha was not always “simple”.  Something traumatic happened to Martha as a child when Fern had to help someone in an emergency and Martha was left alone with her father.

 

Once you figure out the theme of Beauty Is…, you can see some of the heavy-handedness of the storytelling.  It was still an interesting yet underwhelming read.  Personally, I found the author’s life more fascinating than her works of fiction.



Tuesday, December 03, 2024

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

22. Frankenstein: The Graphic Novel

By Mary Shelley (Published 2009 by Classical Comics)



Thursday, November 14, 2024

21. Holes

By Louis Sachar

My daughter really enjoyed Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game and requested more mystery books for her birthday. I googled "best YA mystery books like The Westing Game" and Louis Sachar's Holes showed up as one of 'em.

The kid gulped down Holes (and The Tattooed Potato) not long after her birthday, learned in the afterword a movie adaptation exists and promptly informed her parents that we should all watch it as a family. Her bookish parents said, well, maybe we should read the book first... well, after trying to wait patiently for about a week, she pretty much demanded that we watch Holes for our movie night (double-billed with my choice for Gremlins 2 since Halloween was approaching).

I had never in my life heard of Holes the movie before, so I was a little wary until I saw some raving Letterboxd reviews. We were all pleasantly surprised at how good the movie was. I realize now the love for this movie comes from Millennials who grew up with Holes. For Gen X parents with a Gen Z kid, this made an excellent family movie.

I ended up reading Holes about a couple of weeks later, and I can now say the movie adaptation was surprisingly faithful to the novel.  It kept the non-linear structure where it jumped back in time to Stanley’s great-great-grandfather and back to current events and then back to the story of Kissin Kate Barlow and Sam the Onion Seller.  I was surprised that the Warden’s snake venom-tainted nail polish scene was in the book – it was so nasty how she scratched Mr Sir’s face with her painted nails!

I might as well write a quick summary:  Stanley lives in a big city and gets caught with a stolen pair of used shoes donated by a famous baseball player, only he didn't steal them.  He gets sent to a remote detention centre in the middle of nowhere that's overseen by the Warden, a wealthy woman whose family has owned the land for generations.  It's called Camp Green Lake because there used to be a lake over a century ago but it's now just parched barren desert.  The boys are all forced to dig one big hole each day to "build character" but there is a nefarious reason that only the Warden knows.  The land is perforated with hundreds and hundreds of five-foot wide and five-foot deep holes.  Stanley gradually gets used the physical demands of the daily hole-digging and becomes one of the boys.  He makes friends with the very quiet Zero, a very bright but illiterate boy. We also learn that Stanley had a great-great-grandfather in Latvia who was cursed by a fortune teller before he immigrated to America because he broke a promise. When Stanley's great-great-grandfather was travelling from New York to Texas, he was robbed by Kiss Kate Barlow.  Ever since then, Stanley's family has always had bad luck.  Stanley's father is a struggling inventor obsessed with finding a cure for foot odor.  When Stanley finds a small object in one of his digs, this sets off a chain of events.  The reader gradually learns that there is a connection between Stanley's family history, the barren land at Camp Green Lake, the Warden, and the boy known as Zero.  Some adventure ensues, and everything gets explained at the end with a satisfying conclusion.

One main difference was that Clyde Livingston was a baseball player in the book, while in the movie, he was a basketball star (which actually makes more sense as basketball has become the more popular sport).  The ending was also slightly different.  In the movie, the storm scene was made more dramatic by having it rain down on all the characters at the Camp Green Lake compound.  In the book, the rain only started as Stanley and Zero/Hector were driving away from Camp Green Lake in the lawyer’s car.

The book was as enjoyable and fun as the movie.  There are many characters and a lot of stuff going on with the nonlinear plot that is fairly complex for a YA novel.  Sachar mentioned how it was important for him to make it digestible and appealing for a 10-11 year old, and he pretty much succeeds in tying up all the loose ends.  I can now understand why my daughter was so impatient to watch the movie after she finished the book.  I heard that Sigourney Weaver wanted to star in Holes the movie because her daughter was also a big fan.

Louis Sachar seems like a genuinely nice, personable guy.  I liked his notes at the end, when he mentioned how Holes was very popular at juvenile detention centers, and he’d received fan mail from the kids there.  He also admitted that he only learned that you can’t actually dig a hole 5 feet deep and 5 feet wide using a five-foot shovel until the movie was being made. There was no room for the actors to swing their shovels!

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

20. Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror & Speculative Fiction

By Lisa Kröger and Melanie Anderson

During the 2020 pandemic, Olman ordered a bunch of books from Argo because he wanted to support a local indie bookshop.
 
I think he had spotted Monster, She Wrote and thought it'd be right up my wheelhouse.  It took me a while to realize this, but it turned out he was right!   At first, I only read the chapters of authors I was already familiar with, ie. Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Sarah Waters, etc.  It was only later when I started reading the book from start to finish that I discovered a treasure trove of new authors.  This also explains why I finally finished it in 2024, as I would read a chapter in between my "regular" reading routine.
 
Even though Monster, She Wrote gives a general overview of sorts, it also pays tribute to the trailblazing women writers of horror and science fiction of the past four centuries starting with the Gothic fiction of Mary Cavendish and Mary Shelley to contemporary award-winners Helen Oyeyemi and Emily St. John Mandel.  Yet what makes this book special is that Kröger and Anderson also shine a light on more obscure and/or overlooked writers, like Ruby Jean Jensen, Elizabeth Engstrom and Kathe Koja.
 
The authors may be academics, but Monster, She Wrote is written in an easy, informal yet informational style with lots of pop-cultural references.  Each featured author is organized by subgenre, gets a brief life history, their better known works (with brief descriptions), recommended reads and a quote. I sat updating my 'to read' list as I went through each author, picking up almost several new books to check out!   
 
Monster, She Wrote is a keeper for sure.  I have my first wave of authors I want to read asap but there will definitely be a second wave as I delve into works by other featured writers.
 
p.s. I've already started checking off my list by:
  •     borrowing the graphic novelThrough The Woods from the library
  •     purchasing a reprint of Elizabeth Engstrom's When Darkness Loves Us
  •     purchasing a reprint of Kathe Koja's The Cipher

Sunday, November 10, 2024

19. The Starless Sea

By Erin Morgenstern

Someone on Librarianologist raved about The Starless Sea and had me at  “secret, magical library”.  I have yet to read The Night Circus, but thought I’d see if The Starless Sea was available as an inter-library loan.  Sure enough, it was.  I figured a library loan was safer than finding my own copy as I’ve been wary of schmaltzy fantasies ever since The House in the Cerulean Sea.   

Despite my suspicions, I got sucked into The Starless Sea quite quickly.  I very much enjoyed the first two-thirds.  Each chapter alternated between a fantastical tale and the “real” world, in which we follow the life of Zachary Ezra Rawlins, an introverted graduate student in Vermont.  One day at the university library, Zach comes across a mysterious book called Sweet Sorrows.  It contains a collection of stories (including a few that the reader has already read), but the book reveals neither author nor publishing info.
 
Zack is then gobsmacked to discover there’s a story about him as a young boy inside the book he’s holding.  The text describes in perfect detail the day he found a painted door in the alley. This boy was also tempted to open it, but for some reason, he talked himself out of it and went home.  The next day, the boy went back to the door, but it had been painted over.
 
Zachary then proceeds to the front desk and asks a friendly librarian for more info about Sweet Sorrows.  The book was apparently donated by The Keating Foundation via the private collection of J. S. Keating.  From there, Zach embarks on an investigation to uncover the mystery surrounding the origins of the book.  Zach’s sleuthing leads him to the annual Algonquin Literary masked ball in Manhattan.  Coincidentally, the event takes place in a matter of days. Zach’s curiosity is great enough that he takes the train and books a hotel near the venue.  Zach eventually meets Mirabel and Dorian, and not long after, he ends up in the secret, magical, underground library, which is the Harbour to The Starless Sea.
 
At this point, I was very much drawn into Zach’s adventure. I was also enjoying the magical world of the library and meta-ness of it all, as Morgenstern makes many references to storytelling, as well as literary references to famous novels.  There’s a passage where one of the “story” characters, Simon, picks up a book that is only described as “a heavy volume with footnotes and a raven on its cover”.  He finds himself “so drawn into its tale of two magicians in England that he loses track of time.”  Clearly, a reference to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell!

[Another book I've read that was also influenced by Clarke’s epic novel was The Ten Thousand Doors of January (2019).  The Starless Sea (2019) is better written than Ten Thousand Doors, but it’s still a pale imitation of Clarke’s masterpiece!]

Later, Morgenstern references another famous novel, this time by Donna Tart, in the bar scene that unfolds from Dorian’s POV.  He’s sitting in a corner, pretending to read The Secret History while spying on Zach and his friends.

      He has quietly longed for relationships with the type of intensity of those within its pages, regardless of the bacchanalian murderousness, but never found it and has now reached an age where he expects he never will. He has read the book seven times already but he does not tell the waitress that…
He thinks the group he is looking at does not have the same level of camaraderie as the characters in his hand but there’s something there. Like each of them individually is capable of the intensity if not the murder but this is not the right grouping. Not quite. He watches their table, watches the hand gestures and the arriving food, and watches something make all three of them laugh and he smiles despite himself and then hides his smile in his drink.

After Zach becomes a guest at the Library and meets the Keeper, the narrative starts getting more convoluted. Around the halfway point, more characters are introduced (as well as many cats, who inhabit the library).  We gradually learn how the various characters are connected to one another in the space-time continuum. But The Starless Sea also starts to gradually divorce itself from any logic and devolves into complete whimsy.  I was curious to see how the author was going to wrap everything together.   Then it just seemed to fall apart.  I was very disappointed.  Even after I had finished, I needed to refer to the plot summary to keep track of what had happened. 

I also had many questions that the narrative never really explored nor addressed.  Why were Miriam and Dorian at the annual Algonquin Literary costume ball?  Does the library contain all the stories of the universe, real AND fabricated?  How did Fate and Time meet, how did they get separated?  So Simon is the father of Mirabel?  At what point did she become Fate?  Why is Mirabel’s hair pink?  What do bees have to do with storytelling?  Why is the starless sea made of honey?  Why was Zach the one chosen to find the lost man again?  So the bees were The Kitchen.  The bees can make almost anything.  That’s kinda… silly?
 
For an almost 500 page novel, the characters were surprisingly underdeveloped. Some reviewers found Zach too passive and thinly drawn.  I had recently watched A Quiet Place: Day One, so all I had to do was picture Joseph Quinn as Zachary Ezra Rawlins and voila, instant likablility and empathy!

So Dorian, he was supposed to be a hot, older man.  Like Viggo Mortensen. We knew very little about Dorian, except one thing, that he used to work for Allegra, the leader of The Collector's Club who's been trying to destroy all the doors to the Library because she's trying to protect it for some reason that I forgot.  We never learn what he was like before he joined Allegra's secret society nor what Mirabel had said to Dorian that ultimately led him to renounce his calling.  This seemed to be a significant moment, especially in a novel about storytelling, but this story was never explored.
 
Zach and Dorian would've made a cute couple, but the two characters barely spent any time together, yet they seemed to be inextricably drawn to one another.  Why?  And little is known about The Keeper and Fate’s history together.  I didn’t really care about their relationship so much, but I was more interested in Zach’s relationship with his mom.  All we know is that he’s the son of a fortune teller.  Kat and Zach’s mom had more interaction and development than Zach did with his own mother!
 
There were often long gaps before we returned to a character.  The bar scene involving Zach, Kat and a third woman was near the beginning at page 44.  When the narrative returns to the bar that night, it's told from Dorian’s POV, it was more than 200 pages later.  Kat’s POV came about at page 391 (Interlude V) when we read her secret journal entries.  The novel is just shy of 500 pages.  Kat’s POV was actually quite interesting, but by then, it was too late.  The author should have included her journal entries much earlier on in the narrative and I found it odd that she didn’t.  Surprised that an editor didn’t catch that.
 
There were some nicely written passages, but at some point, The Starless Sea felt like a jumbled mess of nicely written passages.  Take this case for example.  In the “real” world, Zach had been gone for weeks since he left Vermont to attend the Algonquin Masked Ball in NY.  Kat had been trying to convince the police that her friend is missing, and trying to retrace Zach’s steps before he disappeared.  The passage below is poignant in the way it captured their fleeting friendship:

     “How well do you know him?” they asked me, over lukewarm police-station tea in an environmentally unfriendly disposable cup with the teabag in it, trying to be more than leaf-flavored water and failing.
     How well does anyone know anyone? We had a handful of overlapping classes and all the game people know each other more or less. We hung out sometimes at bars or by the crappy coffee machine in the media building lounge. We talked about games and cocktails and books and being only children and not minding being only children even though people seemed to think we should.
     I wanted to tell them that I knew Z well enough to ask him for a favor and to return it. I knew which cocktails on a bar menu he would order and how if there wasn’t anything interesting he’d get a sidecar. I knew we had similar views on how games can be so much more than just shooting things, that games can be anything, including shooting things. Sometimes he would go dancing with me on Tuesday nights because we both liked it better when the clubs weren’t so crowded and I knew he was a really good dancer but he had to have at least two drinks before you could get him out on the floor. I knew he read a lot of novels and he was a feminist and if I saw him around campus before 8 a.m. it was probably because he hadn’t slept yet. I knew I felt like we were right at that place where you go from being regular friends to help-you-move-dead-bodies friends but we weren’t quite there yet, like we needed to do one more side quest together and earn a few more mutual approval points and then it would be something a little more comfortable, but we hadn’t figured out our friendship dynamic entirely.
     “We were friends,” I told them and it sounded wrong and right.
But Kat and Zach never saw each other again.  There were many half-formed or under-explored relationships throughout The Starless Sea.  Zach and Mirabel also became friends in a way.  At one point, after the library had been destroyed, Mirabel appeared alive if somewhat dishevelled.  She enlists Zach to aid in her search for the lost man (Simon).  Yet they get separated early on.  I understand that Morgenstern is trying to subvert conventions/expectations of a fantasy adventure, but come on.  Why spend so much effort setting up Zach and Mirabel to embark on a quest.  It’s frustrating and just not fair to the reader.
 
I was quite involved in the narrative for hundreds of pages, which seemed to be building up to something, and then to have a story that at first seemed so cohesively imaginative, all disintegrate into whimsy, it felt like such a cop-out.  Instead of a world that made sense, it just seemed like anything goes.  Like when Zach found himself rowing in an ocean made of paper confetti.  Like what?  Is this subverting a genre, or just being whimsically lazy?  It’s much, much harder to create a fantastical work of fiction that has logic and cohesion.  At some point, I didn’t much care what each character signified.  So Zach drowned in the Starless Sea…?  Oh, too bad.  Wait, he came back?  Whatevs.  By then, my faith in having a satisfying conclusion had been shattered and I just wanted it to end.
 
Still, I enjoyed most of The Starless Sea, but the denouement could go to hell for all I care!  The writing could have really benefited with another editing pass, especially for the final act!  I suspect that anticipation for the author’s follow-up to The Night Circus might have been a factor in the rush to publish.  Morgenstern is no Susanna Clarke nor Donna Tartt, but she’s still a damn good writer.  The first two-thirds of The Starless Sea was impressive enough for me to want to read The Night Circus.  It’ll be another library loan though!

-----

     “Where is everyone?” Zachary asks, the annoyance obvious in his voice but the Keeper does not look up from his writing.
     “You and I are here, your friend is in his room, Rhyme is likely watching him or attending to her duties, and I do not know Mirabel’s current location, she keeps her own counsel.”
     “That’s it?” Zachary asks. “There’s five of us and…cats?”
      “That is correct, Mister Rawlins,” the Keeper says. “Would you like a number for the cats? It might not be accurate, they are difficult to count.”
      “No, that’s okay,” Zachary says. “But where…where’d everyone go?”
     The Keeper pauses and looks up at him. He looks older, or sadder, Zachary can’t tell which. Maybe both.
     “If you are referring to our former residents, some left. Some died. Some returned to the places that they came from and others sought out new places and I hope that they found them. You are already acquainted with those of us who remain.”
     “Why do you remain?” Zachary asks.
      “I remain because it is my job, Mister Rawlins. My calling, my duty, my raison d’être. Why are you here?”
     Because a book said I was supposed to be, Zachary thinks. Because I’m worried about going back because of crazy ladies in fur coats who keep hands in jars. Because I haven’t figured out the puzzle yet even though I don’t know what the puzzle is.
     Because I feel more alive down here than I did up there.
     “I’m here to sail the Starless Sea and breathe the haunted air,” he says and the echoed statement earns a smile from the Keeper. He looks younger when he smiles.
     “I wish you the best of luck with that,” he says. “Is there anything else I might help you with?”

Tuesday, October 15, 2024