11. Are You Willing to Die For the Cause?

By Chris Oliveros

10. On the Far Side of the Mountain

By Jean Craighead George

9. The Decagon House Murders

By Yukito Ayatsuji

I first heard about The Decagon House Murders, and the genre of Japanese honkaku, from Olman.  The premise (and cool book cover) seemed very appealing:  a group of university students who are part of a Mystery Fiction Club get dropped off by boat to spend a week on Tsunojima Island, once home to a famous yet eccentric and reclusive architect, Seiji Nakamura. He had built the Blue Mansion where he and his wife resided, as well as the Decagon House, a ten-sided annex building that was primarily designed for amusement. 

 

Several months previous, a multiple homicide occurred on the island, with the Blue Mansion completely destroyed by fire.  The bodies of Seiji Nakamura, his wife (missing a hand!), their housekeepers, and the gardener’s wife were identified, but the gardener had apparently disappeared without a trace.  The case remains unsolved by police.  The uncle of a member of the Mystery Fiction Club had recently bought Tsunojima Island, so this gave the other members an “in” to visit the site and investigate the mystery of those recent events. 

 

The seven students use the still standing Decagon House as their home base.  The idea of a group of characters staying in a ten-sided house on a tiny island is genius, providing a cool location in which to set a locked room mystery. An illustration of the interior early on in the book's pages shows how the layout is designed:  a decagon within a larger decagon.  There are ten rooms that comprise the outer decagon: 7 guest rooms with the remaining 3 rooms as the entrance hall, kitchen and bathroom.  The main hall takes up the inner decagon and in the middle of the decagonal hall is a decagonal table with ten chairs.  There are even ten-sided plates and cups!  Also included in the book is an illustrated map of Tsunojima Island showing the location of the Blue Mansion ruins and The Decagon House. 

 

I love the concept of a Decagon House, and there are a number of artistic envisionings of Nakamura's decagonal curiosity in mangas and various book covers (shown above and below).

 

And I really enjoyed reading the novel, though I wasn’t able to figure out who the murderer was until the end.  As with most mysteries, it was slow going at first, as characters got introduced and the set up was established.  The narrative alternated between the students trapped on the island and the few characters on the mainland, three of whom received a mysterious letter, apparently from the ghost of Seiji Nakamura. 

 

 

 

I haven’t read very many of the classic mysteries, including And Then There Were None, from which The Decagon House was heavily influenced by, having only read one Agatha Christie book, Murder On the Orient Express.  As I had already noted:

 

“I always thought that part of the fun of reading murder mysteries is to guess who the culprit is based on what the investigator discovers and observes, but I find this limiting as you can only deduce based on what the author chooses to reveal in the narrative.  Thus, the reader always has an unfair advantage, especially if you’re dealing with an implausible story.”

 

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

 

 

 

This same limited omniscience also applied to The Decagon House Murders.  The plot was not as implausible as Murder On the Orient Express, but it did involve love triangles, secret affairs, illegitimate children, and of course, multiple murders. The author was very careful to mask the murderer (for both the backstory AND the present timeline) for the reader until he was ready to spring the surprise. It was very nicely done.  In hindsight, all the clues were there, though doled out very strategically, and I think if one took the time to analyze all the characters and the carefully revealed info, it’s possible to deduce who the mastermind was.  I only took a few moments to think about who the murderer could be, and my best guess was it could’ve been the First Victim, Orczy (only one of two females, the other being Agatha).  Orczy had a motive as she was good friends with Chiori (later revealed to be Seiji’s daughter) and was devastated by her death. If she were to take revenge, Orczy would’ve feigned her death and be in cahoots with Poe, the medical student who confirmed her death to the others (plus the monologue at the beginning was male).  No one else really looked at her body, so it was easy to keep herself confined to her room, yet she can go out the window to commit her nefarious deed.  Of course, when Poe died, I knew I was wrong, because author Yukito Ayatsuji was very careful to set things up to have the reader rule out the actual suspect.

 

First, you never knew the real names of the Mystery Club members, as they went by their famous author nicknames from the very beginning.  When it was revealed that six bodies were found, you then realized that it could be either Van or Ellery, but then Ellery’s body was identified.  So who was Van (Dine)?  And then shortly after, it was revealed to be the armchair detective, Kyoichi Morisu, who had a secret romance with Chiori. Then it launched into his POV, ie. his motives, him making sure to tell certain people he had opted out of going to Tsunojima Island, and then took great pains to hide the fact that he had been traveling back and forth between the island and the mainland to make it seem that he was always at each respective location to whomever he was interacting with.  As Van, he had to convince the other club members, who were sharp and observant mystery fans, that he was sick with a fever so that he could retire early to rest in his room. 

 

The one factor that the novel hinged on was that, even though it had occurred to the students that it was necessary to search each other’s rooms, to see if they were hiding anything, this never happened for whatever reason I couldn’t remember.  But this should’ve been a priority, especially after two of their members had died by strangulation and poison!  It seemed a little hard to believe that no one looked inside Van’s room this entire time.  One of them even remarked how odd it was that he locked his door when he gone to bed early that first night!

 

The Decagon House Murders has recently been adapted for a 2024 Japanese mini-series, and has received some decent reviews.  I may have to check this out now that I’ve read the book.  Olman also has no plans of keeping the book, so I'm holding onto it for now!

 

Some interesting info:

The Decagon House Murders is the debut novel of Yukito Ayatsuji, and the first volume of the House Series. A draft of the novel was originally submitted to the twenty-ninth Ranpo Edogawa Prize in 1983 under the title Island of Remembrance, but ultimately fell short. It was later published by Kodansha Novels with its updated title in 1987.

Although Souji Shimada's 1981 debut with The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is oftentimes credited as the first true shinhonkaku detective novel, The Decagon House Murders is widely given credit for launching the boom in shinhonkaku-style novels that came to dominate the 1990s. Many of the trademarks of the movement can first be seen in this particular title, such as metatextual references to classical detective fiction, as well as subtle nods to more contemporaneous writers.

8. My Side of the Mountain

By Jean Craighead George

I was in Grade 6 when I was first introduced to My Side of the Mountain while attending Kerrisdale Elementary.  I, along with my two friends Ellen and Etta, was a bit of a teacher’s pet.  Mr Hoffman often gave us lunch money to buy him a sandwich at the nearby convenience store on 41^st Ave.  Looking back, it seems a little cringey now, but Mr Hoffman did provide some great reading material.  He was the sort of teacher who wore a suit to school every day, so not sure how much input he had in choosing the books for the curriculum, as the theme seemed to be surviving alone in the wild.  The three books I recall were Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens, Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins and Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain. 

Over the years, I’ve acquired copies of Island of the Blue Dolphins and My Side of the Mountain (my faves of the three books), including a copy of Frightful’s Mountain.  I recently found a copy of On the Far Side of the Mountain so felt I could jump into MSofM as I want to revisit the theme of wilderness survival for a short story I’m working on and maybe follow it up with the sequel.

 

These three books, MSotM esp, inspired my brief obsession with running away and living off the forest during my adolescence.  I had spotted a wilderness survival book at the Kerrisdale Public Library and promptly borrowed it.  I remember filling up my Steno spiral pad (the ones using green paper - Gregg ruled with a centre margin line – good for supply lists and shorthand notation) with drawings and copious notes. 

 

During this phase, I’d often fantasize about running away from home and living off the land somewhere in remote BC.  Sam Gribley had the advantage of having legacy family-owned property to use as a home base - his great-grandfather’s abandoned farm in the Catskill Mountains.  His motives were also different from mine – he had a true desire to live off the land, while I dreamed of getting away from my strict, oppressive parents.  I wasn’t happy growing up at home, so studying up on wilderness survival provided an outlet for my nerdy creativity and gave me something to distract myself from my depressingly cloistered situation.

 

Even at 12 years old, I knew the potential risks of a young girl traveling alone to a remote area of BC.  As an adult in the year 2025, My Side of the Mountain seems such an incredibly innocent and romanticized story of a 12 year old boy living like Davy Crockett in the Catskill Mountains.  It isn’t about whether Sam is capable of surviving on his own, or evading wild predators. Or how relatively easy it seemed to capture and train his falcon, Frightful, to hunt food for him.  Human predators also pose a potential threat. 

 

When Sam returns to his hollowed out hemlock tree, he finds a man there.  Hearing sirens earlier, he thought the man might be an escaped bandit, so he calls him “Bando”.  He turns out to be an English prof who got lost while hiking and decided to take a nap.  Sam and Bando become fast friends with Bando spending ten days with Sam helping him build a raft, make jam from the blueberries growing at the farm and carve whistles out of willow branches.  It goes to show how much innocence has been lost when someone like myself is surprised Bando didn’t take advantage of Sam in any way in the secluded forest.

 

Sam also steals deer carcasses from human hunters who have lost track of their prey.  I imagine a few of them would be mighty pissed and figure out that the rumours of a wild boy in the Catskills might be true, and start hunting for the kid.  But this never happens.

 

Then there’s the romanticisation of living off the land.  Not a word was used to describe how Sam deals with his own waste.  Does he dig a hole?  What does he use for toilet paper? Does he find a way to compost?  How does he keep his teeth clean?  He only got sick a couple times:  once almost succumbing to CO2 poisoning while sleeping in his tree from an unvented fire and another time from scurvy symptoms due to a lack of fresh greens in the late winter (quickly remedied with a hunger for rabbit liver).  He also never seems to injure himself, a miracle for a young boy living in the wild.

 

The book spends a fair amount of time describing the food Sam prepares and eats. He picks blueberries and strawberries that grow wild on his great-grandfather’s old farm.  He gathers wild onion and fragrant plants to add flavor to his meals, nuts and cattail tubers to supplement protein and carbs.  Learns how to make acorn flour, smoke fish and venison, and acquire salt from hickory sticks (when boiled dry they leave a salty residue).

 

Some of his meals include acorn pancakes topped with Bando’s blueberry jam.  Turtle soup.  Rabbit stew.  Pheasant pot pie.  Fish wrapped in leaves and baked in hot coals with wild rice. Boiled freshwater mussels with salt.  Then “take out meat. Eat by dipping in acorn paste flavored with a smudge of garlic, and green apples.”

 

For his first guest Bando, he prepares a feast:

 

“Brown puffballs in deer fat with a little wild garlic, fill pot with water, put venison in, boil. Wrap tubers in leaves and tick in coals. Cut up apples and boil in can with dogtooth violet bulbs. Raspberries to finish meal.”

 

Don’t get me wrong.  I enjoyed the food parts.  But the attention to detail could’ve also been paid to other important things.  For example, when Sam first set off for the mountains, he only had a penknife, a ball of cord, an ax, some flint and steel, and $40.  There was no mention of him acquiring more tools, but what did he use to cut up the deer into venison steaks to freeze for the winter?  Surely he didn’t rely on just his penknife and ax?

 

Sam’s parents are also praised for their unconventionality by allowing Sam such autonomy (though the mom does have concerns about being judged by normal society and by the novel’s end, the entire family leaves NYC to join Sam a la American Family Gribley). 

 

That being said, I can see why I loved My Side of the Mountain so much as a kid.  Despite the lack of useful info on how to survive four seasons in the Catskill Mountains and any sense of real risk, it was still a wonderfully written adventure story.  A true classic.  My daughter also read the book about a year ago, but as expected, it did not inspire the same sense of wonder and desire from her as it did me.  It was just lovely to revisit this book again after all these decades. 

7. Animal Farm

By George Orwell

 

6. Rebecca

By Daphne Du Maurier

 

 

5. House of Leaves

By Mark Z. Danielewski

I requested Hubs to get me House of Leaves last Xmas and got the Remastered Full Color Edition (2000).  Apparently, the Remastered edition gives a “fuller” experience and adds another layer of meaning.   

 

In Remastered Full Color Edition edition:

• Any iteration of the word "house" appears in blue, even in the blurbs section and the publication page where it mentions “Random House, Inc."
• The word "minotaur" and all crossed-out passages appear in red.
• There is one line written in purple, which is important because of what the color implies for the story.
• The pictures in the appendices are full color.
• There's a bit in the book written in braille with a translation in the footnotes.

 

In the two-color edition (with the doorknob cover):

• EITHER "house" appears in blue OR "minotaur"/crossed out passages appear in red. One or the other, not both. It's a gamble which you'll get.
• The line that is purple in the full color is not written in purple.
• The braille bit doesn't appear.
• The pictures in the appendices might be color or they might be black and white. Again, it's a gamble.

 

I’ve been curious about House of Leaves for some years, but its ambitious density and heft had seemed somewhat daunting.  As I delved more into horror fiction over the past few years, it was becoming apparent that House of Leaves was required reading if I was to be a true fan of the genre.  It’s got a bit of everything:  a 'haunted' house, super-natural horror, mystery, psychological thriller, unreliable narrator(s)… there’s even a love story.

 

If you get past the multi-layered experimental meta-fiction and epistolary complexity, there’s a very simple story at heart.  Johnny Truant, a disaffected 25 yr old in LA, discovers a chest full of scribbled notes and an unfinished manuscript left by his friend’s blind and elderly neighbour, Zampanò, who died of mysterious circumstances.  The manuscript focuses on "The Navidson Record", a documentary film directed by acclaimed photojournalist, Will Navidson.

 

"The Navidson Record" documents how Navidson and his family move into their new home in the Virginia suburbs.  They soon discover that their house is not normal, at least physically.  It started off as a puzzle - why was there a discrepancy of 3/4 of an inch between the inside and outside measurements of the house?  This seemingly small difference triggers Navidson's obsessive tendencies to find an explanation for these spatial discrepancies and sets in motion a series of increasingly unsettling events. The house then exhibits further anomalies, like a closet appearing where there was previously a blank wall.  A door appears in the living room revealing a dark and vast liminal space that is not physically possible if you stand outside the house.  When the house reveals itself to contain a seemingly endless labyrinth, Navidson contacts his estranged brother Tom and an old friend Reson to mount an exploration of its hidden dimensions. Navidson's obsession with the labyrinth leads him and his family into increasingly terrifying situations.

 

Navidson, Tom and Reston soon realize they are way in over their heads when the walls of the labyrinth start to shift and they barely find their way back “home” inside the “normal” confines of the house.  They hire a professional explorer, Holloway Roberts, and his two assistants, Kirby “Wax” Hook and Jed Leeder to mount a proper expedition armed with gear and camera equipment.  Needless to say, the expedition goes awry as the men get lost and Holloway goes crazy, a la Jack Torrance and goes on a bit of a rampage. 

 

House of Leaves is a bit of a sausage fest, but there are some sections devoted to Navidson’s long-time partner Karen and their strained relationship.

 

Zampanò's claims that "The Navidson Record" :

became an American cultural phenomenon upon its theatrical release in 1993, generating volumes of multidisciplinary academic literature, as well as extensive media coverage in popular culture. In support, Zampanò cites or quotes articles, journals, symposia, books, magazines, TV programs, and interviews, many supposedly dedicated to this film. Zampanò discusses not only Navidson's filmmaking techniques, but also segues into topics such as photography, architecture, Biblical studies, and radiometric dating, often interspersing overwhelmingly esoteric tangents, several of which devolve into nonsensical, page-long lists of only superficially relevant items. Though many of the academic works Zampanò cites appear to analyze The Navidson Record purely as a work of found-footage horror fiction, Zampanò's writing remains adamant as to its authenticity.

(from Wikipedia)

It should be noted that in the flyleaf, House of Leaves is authored by Zampanò with the Introduction and Notes by Johnny Truant.  There’s a contrast in mood and style between the Navidson and Johnny Truant sections.  There are the obvious tonal differences between the strained domesticity inside the house on Ash Tree Lane Virginia (portrayed via various media) versus Zampanò's dry academic writing style versus the slacker lifestyle of an assistant tattooist in an urban metropolis. 

 

Johnny Truant reminded me of the protagonist in The Cipher.  Within Nicholas, there already existed an existential emptiness when he came upon The Funhole in the dingey basement of his apartment building.  Nicholas hopelessly pined after the cold-hearted Nakota while Truant kept hooking up with Zampanò’s former readers and they all happen to be physically attractive.  Johnny became obsessed with Zampanò’s manuscript soon after he discovered the box full of his notebooks.  As he immersed himself in Zampanò’s world, it was akin to going down a rabbit hole, or the Funhole for Nicholas.  Both characters began to change (for the worse) as their obsession started taking over their lives, exerting a destructive toll on their mental and physically health.  

 

The book interweaves the text written by Zampanò and Truant.  There's also a third party, the “Editors”.  Visually and structurally, there's intertextual playfulness and cleverness aplenty.  It also plays heavily with footnotes.  Sometimes the footnotes take over the pages and there are even footnotes for the footnotes.

 

With an ever-present tension between what was supposed to real or fabricated, it seemed a given that the author must create a book where the text reflected this interplay, as well as the impossibility of the house on Ash Tree Lane.  At certain points, the text became moving pieces.  Some pages had only a few sentences while a page was completely blank except for one innocuous word.  When the labyrinth suddenly expanded, the text expanded with it, or contracted, etc.  At another point, you had to read the text backwards.  It was pretty neat.

In terms of conventional genres, there were elements of horror, mystery, and psychological thriller.  Most of that narrative was found in "The Navidson Record" (the text by Zampanò).  For me, those sections about the house on Ash Tree Lane were the most riveting parts from House of Leaves.  

 

I don’t think I’m alone in that the Truant sections were the least-liked in House of Leaves.  In one forum, a reader asked if they could skip over some of the more indulgent passages and someone else said that you should really try to stick through it and read everything. 

 

The narrative that was woven through "The Navidson Record" was a mixed bag.  The horror wasn’t really all that scary, though there were sections that were definitely peculiar or uncanny.  The love story was meh.  Some say, at its heart, House of Leaves was a love story.  But narrative mostly portrayed the strained relationship between Will and Karen, the typical famous artist/intrepid adventurer who cannot stay within the confines of domesticity for stretches of time. I really thought Navidson was going to fulfill his death-wish and be lost inside the house forever, but Karen finds Navidson in the end, his body weak and broken.  It made me think of Rochester in Jane Eyre.  The only way Karen & Navidson could be together was if Navidson was so crippled, he could not on any more adventures.

 

The mystery was the most gripping part for me, at least in the beginning, as I was wondered what the fuck was up with that house?  But I quickly realized the mystery of the house was the mystery of human nature externalized as a familiar structure.  And how the author was toying with his reader right from the start.

About a quarter into the book (not counting the appendices and index which also takes up a quarter of the book’s thickness), Navidson mentioned someone in his past named Delial.  The reader soon learns that Navidson became famous for a photo he took called “The Vulture and the Little Girl”.
Serendipitously, a couple of days before, I had learned about this very photo in my FB feed, a “real” photo taken by real-life photojournalist, Kevin Carter.  I even googled him so his story was fresh on my mind.
 
So right away I knew Navidson was based on Kevin Carter who had won the Pulitzer Prize for his a photo of a skeletal child stopping to rest while a vulture watched nearby, taken while he was documenting the 1993 famine in Sudan.  Even though the photo was known as “TheVulture and the Little Girl”, the child was later revealed to be a boy. In House of Leaves, the child was always a girl.
 
Four months after being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography, Carter died by carbon monoxide poisoning in 1994 at age 33.  Apparently, Carter received a lot of criticism about that award-winning photograph, but it seemed like PTSD, poverty and despair were also contributing factors to his suicide. His suicide note read:

I'm really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist. …depressed … without phone … money for rent … money for child support … money for debts … money!!! … I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners … I have gone to join Ken (a deceased colleague) if I am that lucky.

Although the text reveals that Navidson was based on a real-life person (another “proof” that Zampano had fabricated "The Navidson Record"), I found the Kevin Carter reference to be rather heavy-handed and almost in poor taste, as it exploited someone’s real-life tragedy.  There was a letter that Navidson wrote to Karen in Chapter XVII that made reference to Delial and tried to capture the deep pain he must have felt being complacent in the face of human suffering.  It echoed Carter's suicide note, felt phony and was the only big misstep (though I was only half-way through) in my immersion into House of Leaves.

 

Apparently, it took Danielewski a good ten years to write House of Leaves, and it shows in the denseness and complexity of the text.  But with such an ambitious scope, it was also uneven and unwieldy in parts.  

 

When I was close to finishing H of L, I was also looking at the colour printed end paper of the book and read the note apparently written by Zampano:

Appendix C:

Perhaps I will alter the whole thing. Kill both children. Murder is a better word. Chad is scrambling to escape, almost making it to the front door where Karen waits, until a barrier in the foyer suddenly leaps forward and hews the boy in half. At the same time Navidson, by the kitchen reaches for Daisy only to arrive a fraction of a second too late, his fingers finding air, his eyes scratching after Daisy as she falls to her death. Let both parents experience. Let their narcissism find a new object to wither by. Douse them in infanticide. Drown them in blood.

Apparently, this is another clue that "The Navidson Record" was fabricated by Zampano/Danielewski.

Another head-slapping moment for me was on p.465 when Navidson was on his last Exploration #5.  His batteries and flares were dwindling and he had only one book with him to pass the time.  Guess which book it was. Fucking House of Leaves!  OMG.  When Navidson had no more light source, he started lighting matches so he could keep reading.  Before his last match burned out, he lit the pages from the book he had just finished reading...  You can’t get any more meta than this.  It's beyond meta - it’s the snake eating itself.  And it confirmed for me that House of Leaves was not only an elaborate exercise in meta-ness, but also an elaborate gimmick.

 

Overall, HoL was still a wonderfully layered and immersive book. It was clever, even brilliant in its playfulness and experimentation.  Without a doubt, it pushed the boundaries of print, text, structure, time, space, and fictional meta-ness.  The book itself was about the nature of our perceptions.  What was also brilliant was that House of Leaves itself, like "The Navidson Record", had generated its own amount of “multidisciplinary academic literature, as well as extensive media coverage in popular culture.”

 

There’s a reddit forum for House of Leaves fans.  One person has even compiled a list of all work, real and fake, referenced in House of Leaves.

 

My only disappointment was at some of the content, which was not as original as its format and execution.  Using Kevin Carter’s story and his photograph kind of cheapened the experience for me.  Johnny Truant reminded me too much of Nicholas in The Cipher. Kathe Koja's novel was published in 1991, so it's very possible that Danielewski would’ve been inspired by it when he was working on House of Leaves.

 

I even asked Google: Did The Cipher influence House of Leaves?

AI Overview:  The Cipher by Kathe Koja and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski share thematic similarities, particularly in their exploration of "malicious non-space". Both novels feature uncanny spaces that are not easily explained by traditional horror tropes of violation or wrongdoing. House of Leaves incorporates ciphers and codes, both within the text and in in the physical layout, mirroring the coded messages in Koja's The Cipher. 

 

Although I wouldn’t call myself a fan, I was without a doubt glad I got to experience House of Leaves.  It only took me two months and one week to finish it. 

 

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 opening credits revealed that it 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.

 

3. The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein

By Kiersten White

A few Goodread reviews mentioned how it was recommended to have some knowledge of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein (2018) has many nods to the original source material. Here's one review: 

“The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein is, essentially, a retelling of Frankenstein from the perspective of Elizabeth - an orphan taken in by the Frankenstein family and later the fiancée of Victor. I think this book will work much better for those familiar with the original as it gives a lot of nods to the story. It's hard to appreciate some of the clever twists the author takes without knowing what it's based on.

 

Through her eyes, the tortured genius of Victor becomes a sometimes frightening thing, and yet nothing is as terrifying as being a woman in 18th Century Europe. The stifling constraints placed on women and their ambitions are palpable as the story unfolds. It was so easy for a woman to be dismissed as whiny or silly, or worse-- mad.

When Victor goes missing in Ingolstadt and writes no letters, Elizabeth begins to track him down. Her investigation leads her down dark paths to charnel houses and secret laboratories. What has Victor been up to? Knowing the truth didn't take anything away from reading. In fact, it made those mysterious dark shadows all the creepier.

This story largely fills in gaps in the original tale, while shedding a completely new light on it. It's smart how Kiersten White has managed to keep a lot the same, while also creating a bigger and very different-looking picture.

The original Frankenstein calls into question what it really means to be a monster and, indeed, who the real monsters are. I think White might have answered that question.”

 

I had read Shelley’s Frankenstein when I was in my late teens/early twenties, and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to revisit the classic 1818 novel, so like the lazy, yet resourcefully efficient, reader that I am, I borrowed the graphic novel version to quicky refresh my memory instead! 

 

According to Wikipedia, Elizabeth Lavenza and Victor Frankenstein were first cousins in the original edition.  In the revised third edition (1831), Elizabeth was a non-relation adopted by the Frankenstein family.  According to the graphic novel, Elizabeth was portrayed as a saint, a self-sacrificing two-dimensional young woman who was loved by the Frankenstein family.  In The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein, she is naturally given much more depth as the Frankenstein narrative is retold entirely from her perspective, and there is a LOT more going on behind her innocent façade.  In fact, she’s a calculating survivor who’s determined to marry Victor, not because of love, but because it was her best option as an orphaned young woman in the 19^th century.

 

I’m going to rely on another Goodreads review to summarize how I felt, as it really does save me a lot of time, and time is precious right now!

“I do not think I expected one of the best books I read this year to be a retelling of Frankenstein where it’s not just about the nature of monstrousness, but about the power of women working together and escaping an abusive relationship, with intoxicating writing and a morally grey lady as the protagonist.

 

I absolutely loved the way Kiersten White wrote the abusive relationship at the heart of this - we see the fucked-up nature of that relationship long before Elizabeth does, but it never feels as if Elizabeth “should’ve known better.” In every moment, she has full audience sympathy - in every moment, even if I hated her actions, I understood her. The narrative puts you so far into her mind that it is impossible to look away and it is glorious.

I think the focus on agency within a narrative should be clear, but I really do want to say - this is why retellings are my favorite. Taking a book that is about the essential nature of humanity from the perspective of a man and flipping its themes solidly is something I will always be in full support of - the meta-textuality of the narrative is absolutely brilliant. And it’s not just about one woman - it’s about the relationships between women and the strength found in them. Mary, Justine, and Elizabeth form such fantastic relationships, and each feels so fully-formed in a way they may not have in the original narrative.”

I will add that, although there were plenty of hints revealing what a narcissistic psychopath Victor was, the twist did take me a little by surprise, and I loved that.  I think part of it was due to re-reading the graphic novel that was based on the original novel.  I kept expecting Frankenstein the monster to kill Elizabeth, and I kept thinking that the monster was also responsible for the deaths of Victor’s little brother William and of the servant Justine, but that was not the case at all.   I think if I hadn't read the graphic novel, I might've clued in sooner, but that's fine, I think I preferred being taken by surprise.

 

Kiersten White did an excellent job setting up the plot twist, and not only that, the denouement was really quite exciting and satisfying.  Mary, the daughter of the book shop owner in Ingolstadt, also has a pivotal role in the denouement, and I’m sure her name is a nod to Shelly.  To be sure, The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein was one of my favourite reads of the year so far.  Highly recommended!

 

p.s. This is yet another winner/recommendation from Monster, She Wrote !