12. Looking Glass Sound

By Catriona Ward 

Looking Glass Sound was another well-written novel by Catriona Ward and also the third book I've read from her (the first being the impressive Rawblood and disappointing The Last House on Needless Street). 

 

I felt a bit cheated by Looking Glass Sound.  I was interested in the book because it was influenced by Stephen King's mysteries set in Maine, but the the meta-fictional nonlinear narrative complexity sidelined me out of a good story. I didn't want to constantly wonder what/who was real and what/who wasn't nor marvel at the writerliness of it all.  Why spend time on something that swallowed up my time with overly-complicated authorial wanking?

So I'm going to cheat myself and use AI to help provide an overview:

Looking Glass Sound is a complex, meta-fictional psychological thriller that explores the blurring lines between memory, reality, and authorship. Narrated by Wilder Harlow, it focuses on a fateful summer in Maine involving an unlikely friendship between three teenagers, a serial killer (the Dagger Man), stolen narratives, and the haunting, constantly questioning what is real versus what is constructed. 

Layered Narrative: The book is designed like a nesting doll, where stories are told and retold, with small differences revealing how memory and stories are altered.

Plot Outline: Wilder is an awkward teen spending the summer at his belated uncle's house in coastal Maine during the 1980s.  He befriends a local boy named Nat and a red-haired British girl named Harper.  For some years now, the town has been haunted by two mysteries: missing women and "The Dagger Man" who breaks into homes during the night to photograph sleeping children with a dagger by their throat and leaving behind a Polaroid, as if to say, I could've easily have killed them while you were asleep. 

Meta-Fiction: The story deals with a writer (Wilder) whose work is stolen and published by another, leading to a blurred reality where he is haunted by the fictional versions of his friends, not the real people. 

Key Themes: The nature of storytelling, the obsession of writing, trauma, and the vulnerability of adolescence. 

The Title: Refers to the deceptive nature of stories and reality, much like a mirror image or sound echoing, distorted, off the water. 

This WeirdLit reddit thread was very helpful in breaking down the structure of the novel. If I ever want to remember what the hell I had read, I should read this thread.

Back to the plot outline.  The novel began as a kind of coming-of-age story with a murder mystery as a backdrop, and with Maine as the setting, it was meant to intentionally invoke 1980s Stephen King. The kids stumble upon the bodies trapped in oil drums underwater and the murderer was revealed about one-quarter into the novel. Nat dies, Harper moves back to England and Wilder becomes haunted by the events of that summer.  In college he works out his trauma by writing about that summer, but his story is stolen by his best friend, Skye aka Pierce Montague.

Summary:

We begin to read excerpts from both the stolen story and Wilder’s version, following Wilder years down the road as he returns to the coast to finally write his book. But Wilder is haunted by, he eventually discovers, the characters from the stolen book— not the real people, but the fictional versions as written by the two writers. The books and reality blur and, the deeper you go, the more you start to wonder what’s real and what’s not. Ward takes you on a twisty-turny journey to reveal how stories capture people— trapping them forever. The mystery of the dagger man is but a thread in the larger narrative— the killer’s identity being revealed and re-revealed over and over again. In the end, everything you thought to be true isn’t, touching on how point of view radically alters reality.

By the time I figured out what was going on with Looking Glass Sound, I began to lose interest in it. Wilder becomes haunted by the characters from Skye's stolen novel. The ghostly drowned woman that Wilder kept seeing, Rebecca, just kept dragging on and on.  Even though Skye/Pierce was supposed to be dead, Wilder found him in a hole when he tried to kill himself with hemlock. Skye had been trapped there for weeks, feeding on raw crab and cave water!!  Skye and Wilder got back together as old men - one blind and the other missing a hand!  I kept going, what the hell am I reading? Then a supposedly "new" character Pearl was introduced about 3/4 into the narrative. By the time it got to Pearl and Harper meeting at Fairview, I just didn't care that much anymore.  I think the novel had made clear that Pearl and Harper were fictional, with the added meta-ness that other characters were made-up by the characters in the novel. Even if Pearl and Harper were the "real" first-level versions and not meta-authorized creations like Skye/Pierce, I had given up being invested in ANY of the characters. Which was ironic since the friendship between Pearl and Harper felt more constructed than the meta-fabricated characters.  It even felt like Ward was getting tired of her own story, as it was more an overly complex exercise than actual storytelling.

So it turned out Wilder and Nat were half brothers?  Harper really did mercy kill Nat?  Gracie is the daughter of Nat and Harper? Whoop-dee-doo. The reveals came too late!  I felt bad because I had been quite invested in Wilder, but his "true" character had died shortly after his story was stolen by Skye/Pearl.  The older Wilder was actually a fictional recreation by Pearl.  He was never able to get any revenge on or justice from Pearl.  Harper was the tragic figure who lost the ones she loved and the only one who could right some wrongs.  In the end she had her daughter Gracie and they manage to get some kind of reckoning from Pearl.

Back to the reddit thread:  

"But why would that be the case, and why has Ward chosen to write such a confusing book? The theme of narrative ownership and true crime has come up a lot in recent years: The Plot ( Jean Hanff Korelitz) concerns a professor who steals one of his grad students' novel ideas, a decision that comes to enrich and destroy him. In I Have Some Questions for You (Rebecca Makkai) boarding school students re-open the murder case of their teacher's long-ago roommate, while a true-crime podcaster does the same. Trust Exercise (Susan Choi) is a layered puzzle-box of a novel that is about a high school drama class, truth-telling, and feeling your way around in the dark. And then there's the real-life controversies that have rocked the world of letters: a plagiarism allegation lobbed at My Dark Vanessa; the real story behind "Cat Person;" and who could forget the saga of the Bad Art Friend?

Writers are all thieves of a kind, but personal testimony was recently a very powerful kind of currency—subject to counterfeit—and the true crime boom still goes on. We're in the midst of two simultaneous national conversations about authorship (who gets to tell what kind of story) and trauma. Authors are grappling with it in real time."

So I get what Ward was trying to do with Looking Glass Sound.  But did it capture the zeitgeist?  It probably did - I can see how many would consider it brilliant.  However, the meta-fiction genre isn't my jam - I want to lose myself in a narrative, not get confused by it.  I did enjoy parts of it, especially the first act as it had some great fiction writing; lots of lovely passages about the sea, air and land.  The meta parts reminded me so much of House of Leaves and David Mitchell's work.  Talented writers often have the ambition of tackling meta-fiction, but there's always the danger of being burdened by textual slog as the human interest parts of the story get buried under the ambitions of the author to create narrative feats of complexity.  

I acquired this hardcover from https://bookoutlet.ca for only $8 and will be including it in my trade pile when I visit Encore Books on my birthday!

16. The Woman in Black

By Susan Hill

While in Vancouver, we once again visited Tanglewood Books looking for YA fiction for our 12 yo.  I found a trade paperback of The Woman in Black.  Even though I've been aware of Susan Hill's 1983 ghost story for some time (thanks to at least two film adaptations, neither of which I saw), it was Monster, She Wrote that got me to put The Woman in Black in my book list.

I was later surprised to see my daughter had started reading the novella.  When she finished it, she thought it was "all right" (her default answer for most things), though she mostly found it kind of boring.

Now here I am with a short review of The Woman In Black.  I knew I'd appreciate it somewhat more than my Gen Z kid.  Even though it was rather tame in some regards, I found it effectively chilling in a low-key way.  A lot of it had to do with Hill's writing.  It's written in a classic, straightforward manner yet manages to evoke a clear sense of setting and mood, and the narrative is framed from the POV of solicitor Arthur Kripps.  It begins with a middle-aged Kripps spending a Christmas evening with his second wife and two stepchildren.  He's asked to tell a ghost story, but he's unable to because of the traumatic experience he had as a young solicitor in London when he was sent off to a remote region to take care of the affairs of a recently deceased widow at Eel Marsh House.

We follow Kripps on his journey northeast from London to the village of Crythin Gifford. There he meets a local contact and he attends the funeral of Mrs Dablow, the reclusive elderly woman who resided at Eel Marsh House all her life.  It's at the funeral where Kripps first sees a pale, mysterious woman dressed all in black from a distance.  The next day, a local coachman takes Kripps to Eel Marsh House, which is situated on a tidal island and is only accessible via a causeway when the tide is low.  This means that when the tide is high, you're effectively cut off from the mainland and the causeway is only passable twice a day.

...As we drew nearer, I saw that the water was lying only shallowly over the rippling sand on either side of us, and that the line was in fact a narrow track leading directly ahead, as if into the estuary itself. As we slipped onto it, I realized that this must be the Nine Lives Causeway – this and nothing more – and saw how, when the tide came in, it would quickly be quite submerged and untraceable. 

     At first the pony and then the trap met the sandy path, the smart noise we had been making ceased, and we went on almost in silence save for a hissing, silky sort of sound. Here and there were clumps of reeds, bleached bone-pale, and now and again the faintest of winds caused them to rattle dryly. The sun at our backs reflected in the water all around so that everything shone and glistened like the surface of a mirror, and the sky had taken on a faint pinkish tinge at the edges, and this in turn became reflected in the marsh and the water. Then, as it was so bright that it hurt my eyes to go on staring at it, I looked up ahead and saw, as if rising out of the water itself, a tall, gaunt house of grey stone with a slate roof, that now gleamed steelily in the light. It stood like some lighthouse, or beacon or martello tower, facing the whole, wide expanse of marsh and estuary, the most astonishingly situated house I had ever seen or could ever conceivably have imagined, isolated, uncompromising but also, I thought, handsome. As we neared it, I saw the land on which it stood was raised up a little, surrounding it on every side for perhaps three or four hundred yards, of plain, saltbleached grass, and then gravel. This little island extended in a southerly direction across an area of scrub and field towards what looked like the fragmentary ruins of some old church or chapel. 

     There was a rough scraping, as the cart came onto the stones, and then pulled up. We had arrived at Eel Marsh House. 

The village of Crythin Gifford was effectively cursed, but everyone is too frightened to voice it aloud, or unable to warn Arthur because it's something that defies reason and logic.  Arthur Kripps has no choice but to do his job and so he gets himself involved in the local lore after seeing odd sightings of a woman in a black old-fashioned dress.  I feel the old-fashioned ghost story is vastly under-rated and very hard to do well because so much of it hinges on the quality of the writing.  I felt I was inhabiting Arthur's character more than just empathizing with what he's experiencing while he's stuck inside Eel Marsh House seeing strange occurrences he can't explain.

...Last night I had been adamant and would have brooked no possible opposition – I was having nothing more to do with Eel Marsh and the Drablow business but would telegraph to Mr Bentley, leave matters - in the hands of Mr Jerome and take the first available train to London. In short, I was going to run away. Yes, that was how I saw it in the bright light of day. I attached no particular blame to my decision. I had been as badly frightened as a man could be. I did not think that I would be the first to run from physical risks and dangers, although I had no reason to suppose myself markedly braver than the next person. But these other matters were altogether more terrifying, because they were intangible and inexplicable, incapable of proof and yet so deeply affecting. I began to realize that what had frightened me most – and, as I investigated my own thoughts and feelings that morning, what continued to frighten me – was not what I had seen –there had been nothing intrinsically repellent or horrifying about the woman with the wasted face. It was true that the ghastly sounds I had heard through the fog had greatly upset me but far worse was what emanated from and surrounded these things and arose to unsteady me, an atmosphere, a force – I do not exactly know what to call it – of evil and uncleanness, of terror and suffering, of malevolence and bitter anger. I felt quite at a loss to cope with any of these things. 

I can now see how my 12 yo would've found this book rather boring.  Maybe she'll appreciate it when I make her read it when she's fully grown!

I also thought Hammer Films did a really nice job adapting the novel into a 2012 film when I finally watched in some months later.

21. A Visit

By Shirley Jackson

First published as "The Lovely House" in 1950 and later reprinted  under the title "A Visit."  While a short story, Biblioasis reprinted it as a cute little book that's part of a series known as, A Ghost Story for Christmas, all of them designed and illustrated by Seth.  It's an attempt to revive a Victorian tradition of reading ghost stories on Christmas Eve.

So this technically counts as a book, right? I might as well end the year with a holiday book, though the actual story doesn't have anything to do with Christmas, nor winter, for that matter.

Margaret is invited to stay at her friend's estate for the summer holidays.  Carla and her parents, Mr and Mrs Rhodes, seem normal and welcoming enough, though Margaret is clearly not from money, but this difference is barely mentioned.  The house is filled with beautiful tapestries with at least one in every room, all embroidered by Carla's mother and the past generations of Rhodes women who have lived in that house.

Carla keeps talking wistfully and/or excitedly about her brother's impending visit, and he finally arrives one day with a friend.  Carla's brother is known only as "the captain", while Margaret finds it peculiar that no one calls the captain's friend by his name, so she asks him and he tells her that his name is Paul.  Margaret also later discovers an old eccentric aunt who keeps to herself (and her cat) high up in the tower.  There are hints that one or more of the characters are merely an apparition as the story goes on.  

The story is very sparsely written, and yet, even though every word is accounted for, it's what's left out that evokes a feeling of oddness and mystery, as befits a Jackson narrative.  But I wouldn't say that "A Visit" was very creepy nor unsettling, not at all like Jackson's other stories.  However, what I found most odd was that in the book, Carla's family name is Rhodes, while the Wikipedia keeps calling Carla's family as the Montagues.

1. Rawblood

 By Catriona Ward

I first heard of Rawblood from a Goodreads recommendation, something like the 100 Best Horror novels since 2000.  It also won the British Fantasy award for best horror novel in 2016. The premise was unbearably intriguing:  a gothic love story with supernatural horror elements set in the Devon moors of the early 20^th century.  

 

Reader, if you’re intrigued as I was, stop reading now, there be big time spoilers ahead!

 

With a title like Rawblood, I assumed it was going to be a modern spin on Wuthering Heights with vampirism, or cannibalism, thrown in (the romantic cannibal flick, Bones and All, has been getting some hype).

 

Well, the North American version is titled The Girl from Rawblood and the hardcover isn’t available yet in Canada (it will also be full price as it’ll be a new release).  However, since Rawblood had been published years ago in the UK, I was able to place an order on Abe Books (along with two Eve Babitz books) for a new UK paperback (for less than $10 USD!) to arrive at my in-laws address during the Xmas holiday. 

 

On New Year’s Day, I flew home solo while hubs and daughter stayed in Berkeley a few more days.  My mild cold had blossomed into a miasma of mucus and phlegm, so my first few days back in Montreal was spent working, eating, horking, and lots of streaming entertainment.  After a few days, I was ready to pick up a book, and chose Rawblood to kick off the year.

Rawblood. Home. It sounds like a battle, like grief, but it’s a gentle name. ‘Raw’ from ‘Straw’, which means ‘flowing’, for the Dart River that runs nearby. ‘Blood’ from ‘Bont’, a bridge. Old words. The house by the bridge over flowing water. It has been in my family since I don’t know when. Rawblood is us and we, the Villarcas, are Rawblood.

The chapter begins in 1910, with eleven year old Iris Villarca and her friendship with the slightly older Tom Gilmore, who works as a groom on the estate, Rawblood.  Iris’ father, Alfonso, forbids her from having close associations with outsiders, so Iris and Tom have to sneak around at night to hang out.

These are among the first things I recall my father teaching me: that I must keep quiet and may not go among many people or to towns, because of the disease; and that Rawblood is written into us.

The reason behind Alfonso’ strict rules is because there is a dreaded family curse.  The nature of the curse is a close-kept secret, but Alfonso tells Iris that it’s horror autotoxicus, a kind of auto-immune disease, and that she must always control her emotions and to never to fall in love with anyone, because that’s when the disease arises, from strong, unbridled emotions.

Loneliness is not what people think it is. It is not a song. It's a little bitter thing you keep close, like an egg under a hen. What happens when the shell cracks? What comes forth?

When Iris realizes that horror autotoxicus isn’t a real disease, and that she had a terrifying vision the night she went to the cave with Tom, Alfonso finally tells her that the family curse is really an apparition in the form of a horribly mutilated woman (always referred to as her) who haunts Rawblood, and somehow causes the untimely death of a family member.  As one Goodreads reviewer put it:  Some see her and go mad, and kill their loved one before she can. Others simply die of fright. Still more claw their own eyes out to rid themselves of the sight of her.

Once Iris asked her father:

What does she want?  From us.

‘It is so strange,’ he says. He’s thoughtful of a sudden, removed. It is moments like this that I remember that my father was a doctor, once. ‘So inconstant, her wishes … they are crude like the desires of a child. She wants us close – she wants us here. But she does not like us to grow, to live.  It is as if she would have Rawblood and all of us in it suspended for ever, unchanging… under glass, in a museum case. What for? Do we amuse her? Sometime I have thought, over the years, that we are merely playthings of a kind.  But she kills her toys, in the end.’

Alternating timelines were devoted to Alfonso’s old friend, Charles Danforth.  Chapter Two introduced Charles in 1881, while he was travelling by train to see Alfonso at Rawblood.  The two men were medical students and roommates, but they had lost touch over the years.  It’s hinted that Charles, being a man of faith, was horrified when he consummated his love for Alfonso.  Meanwhile Alfonso had always been obsessed with finding a cure for the family curse.  Being a man of science, he believed the curse was a form of congenital madness that has plagued the Villarcas-Hopewells bloodlines for generations. Charles was coming to help Alfonso with his research, just like old times.

 

While Charles and Alfonso conducted their strange experiments in the bowels of Rawblood, their relationship was fraught with tension, dead tortured lab animals, repressed secrets, laudenam and latent homosexuality.  When Charles finally set eyes on her, he was traumatized as he realized there was no God, and ended up committing suicide.  We learn later that Iris’ mother was Charles’ estranged younger sister, Meg, whom Alfonso had promised to take care of and later married. 

Sometimes, I walk through it in my dreams - the interior of my heart. It is like a black land, where black flags hang in tatters and venomous plants grow in sickly clumps and serpents writhe...A deadly night garden, my heart.

Eventually, Iris met a grim fate after her father died because the apparition appeared just when Iris attempted to escape from Alfonso’s control.  Iris was then committed to an insane asylum, as the authorities thought she had killed her father.  I was like, holy shit, this really sucks.  Maybe Tom will help her escape somehow and they’ll figure out how to end the curse.  At some point, I came to realize that Iris wasn’t going to get out -- it was looking like she was going to waste away inside that institution for the rest of her life… and then she just died.  I was like, WTF.  This is one dark motherfucker of a book!  

 

The book also jumped back in time to Iris’ grandparents, Don Vallarca and Mary Hopewell, to when they first met.  It was a lovely story that diverted from Iris’ horrible fate, and that section alone could’ve made a nice gothic romance.  But it was also a kind of red herring, as it strengthened my belief that there was some malevolent supernatural entity and made me wonder how it could’ve latched onto the Vallarca and Hopewell family.

 

The reveal of the Rawblood Ghost’s identity was not as revelatory as it could’ve been by no fault of the author.  It’s because the time-transcending nature of the apparition immediately made me think of The Bent Neck Lady from the hit Netflix series, The Haunting of Hill House.  Time-travelling ghosts probably aren’t a novel idea, but probably not common either.  Rawblood was published in 2015, so it’s possible that Mike Flanagan was inspired by the very cool idea that entities from the spiritual realm are not bound by space and the linear advancement of time.  

 

But yeah, it turned out that the authorities were right, Iris did kill her father, but not in the way they had thought!  And yes, dear reader, Iris was, had become, and will always be The Bent Neck Lady.  Ooooh, brrrrrr, shiver!

 

It was a slow burning, very detailed and meandering (if at times, uneven) build up to that shocking ending.  Because of that, Rawblood was ultimately a satisfying read – with a tragic ending of all endings.  What also elevated this book was Ward’s writing – haunting and evocative without being too prosey, and powerful enough to make you feel the pangs of Iris’ isolation and how generational trauma can reverberate backwards in time.  An amazing feat.  

 

I would never dare to read Rawblood again, it was so bleak and dark in its melancholic beauty.  But I appreciate that other readers also loved this book.