23. Doctor Sleep

By Stephen King

22. Frankenstein: The Graphic Novel

By Mary Shelley (Published 2009 by Classical Comics)

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!

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

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?”

18. The Westing Game

By Ellen Raskin

17. Through The Woods

By Emily Carroll

16. The Ant World Chronicles

By JH

15. Night Shift

By Stephen King

I believe I had picked up this copy of Night Shift at Encore Books back in March.  We visited the Montreal Pinball Arcade for the first time and had a great time.  They had a special Family Friday Funday during spring break. We had a rental car as we’d visited a cabane á sucre and thought we’d make a day of it in NDG.  After the arcade, we found a nearby restaurant to have dinner (the well-liked neighbourhood Korean joint Hwang Kum).  There was a bit of a wait, so I think that’s how we ended up at Encore Books & Records while we were waiting to get a table.

Even though Night Shift was the only book I bought there, Encore was the kind of secondhand bookstore I wish we had in our own  neighbourhood.  It was just a mass market paperback for $3.95 (the Paragraphe sticker was still stuck on the back for $12.99 so it was a deal!), but it can be tricky finding early Stephen King books that are in good used condition.

Believe it or not, this is my first time reading the short stories of Stephen King.  I had brought it to Vancouver during our summer visit and soon confirmed how the short fiction format and King’s flair for the macabre proved to be perfect for intermittent reading breaks.  I even read Night Shift on the beach which I rarely do (though I try).

I was impressed with “Jerusalem’s Lot” because it was my first time reading a “period piece” of King’s and was surprised at how believable it was.  When he writes in a contemporary setting, he has a familiar style of writing that’s recognizably his, but in "Jerusalem’s Lot", he really affects a more classic style, weaving a story in epistolary form, no less.  It was an effectively creepy gothic tale with occult elements.

“Graveyard Shift” was delightfully nasty and fun.  A rag tag group of men are hired for a graveyard shift to clean up an abandoned textile mill.  As they make their way deep down into the sub-level basement, they encounter mutant ROUS’s!

“Night Surf” was a precursor to The Stand, as it portrays a group of former college students who survived a deadly flu-like virus known as A6 or “Captain Trips”.  It was kind of meh, as there’s some self-involved drama as these twenty-somethings hang out at the beach and ponder what to do if they’re truly the last survivors of a plague that may have wiped out most of humanity.  I barely remember it (as I write my review several months later).

I don’t remember much of “I Am the Doorway” either, but as I read through the plot summary, I realize it had a really cool premise about a disabled astronaut who had been exposed to an alien mutagen during his last voyage.  This alien presence gradually takes over his body in a cool way.

Of course, it’s hard to forget “The Mangler”, about a haunted industrial laundry press machine! After a series of gruesome deaths at the Blue Ribbon Laundry involving “the Mangler”, a police detective enlists a professor with knowledge of the occult, who hypothesizes that through a confluence of unrelated events, the mangler had incidentally consumed several ingredients (the blood of a virginal victim; the blood of a bat nesting in the building; and horse's hoof from a container of Jell-O in a bag lunch) that are commonly used in occult rituals, inadvertently summoning a demon that has now possessed the mangler. To remove it, Hunton and Jackson prepare to exorcise the machine and then crazy shit happens!

When I got to “The Boogeyman”, I realized that the 2023 movie I watched during a flight was a loose adaptation of this story, which was about “how toxic masculinity was as much of a factor that contributed to the demise of Lester Billings' kids as The Boogeyman himself. Lester's show of toughness and tough love was really a facade for his cowardice and incompetence as a protector of his children.”

“Gray Matter” involves a group of men who deliver beer to a local guy during a winter storm. Richie has become a bit of a recluse after a serious work injury and was given lifetime worker’s comp.  Unbeknownst to his fellow townsfolk, Richie drank a bad batch of beer some time ago and has mutated into a massive fungal creature-like abomination that hates sunlight.  Even though he was addicted to warm beer, he has since graduated to cats and now people!

“Battleground” is one that Olman really remembered and enjoyed.  It’s also short and sweet. A professional hit man named Renshaw just finished a job that involved ending a toy-maker and picks up a package that was delivered to his apartment building.  When he gets home to his penthouse, he opens it to find a toy-sized G.I. Joe Vietnam Footlocker containing 20 infantrymen, 2 helicopters, 2 BAR men, 2 bazooka men, 2 medics, 4 jeeps.  Renshaw soon learns that these toy soldiers are alive and their weapons, albeit in miniature form, actually work and !  They also have a mission: to kill Renshaw!  Thus, Renshaw’s penthouse becomes a battleground of life and death! 

And “Trucks”!  “Trucks” was thrillingly awesome.  It’s like Skynet but with all the car and trucks in the world inexplicably becoming self-aware and proceeding to destroy every human being in sight.  The story focuses on a handful of strangers who find themselves trapped inside a truck stop as semi-trailers menacingly prowl the parking area and freeway looking to smash and flatten anything in human form.

“Trucks” totally reminded me of Steven Spielberg’s 1971 film Duel.  Sure enough, I learned that “Trucks” (1973) was indeed inspired by Duel, which is Stephen King’s fave Spielberg film as he loves movies with trucks in it.  Duel in turn was based on a short story by Richard Matheson. What’s more, Maximum Overdrive was based on Trucks (I ended up watching it on Tubi) and the only movie directed by Stephen King.  It was a flop and critically panned, but I enjoyed it.

“Sometimes They Come Back” is about a high school teacher (Jim Norman) who becomes haunted by a triad of greasers who had bullied him as a kid and stabbed his brother to death.  Haunted isn’t the right word as the bullies seem to come back to life.  One of them even joins his class as a student.  After they kill a few people, including Jim’s wife, he acquires a book called Raising Demons, that helps him to summon a demon, as he obvs needs supernatural intervention in dispatching the undead greasers.  Pretty classic yet improbably premise but it made a nice tale.

“Strawberry Spring” is told from the POV of an unnamed narrator as he nostalgically recalls a period in his life when he was a college student in 1968. A “false” spring brought in a thick fog that enveloped the town at night, providing perfect cover for a serial killer called “Springheel Jack”.  Several female students had been murdered and the narrator recalled the feelings of fear and hysteria on campus.  There were false alarms, a suspect being arrested, but another student was murdered while the suspect was in jail.  Then the killings stopped as soon as the fog left.  Eight years later, the Strawberry Spring returned and a body of a woman was found.  The narrator’s wife was upset at him for not coming home the night before.  She suspects he’s cheating on her, but he really can’t remember where he was.  It becomes apparent that the narrator has been the killer all along with very selective memory lapses.  This story was ok as I kind of saw this coming.

“The Ledge” was a cool tale of suspense.  I immediately recognized it as I’d watched Cat’s Eye several months ago.  According to Wikipedia, King wrote "The Ledge" as a homage to the 1956 story "Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket" by Jack Finney

“The Lawnmower Man” wasn’t what I expected, mostly because of the movie, which apparently did not have much in common with the short story.  Suburban man hires a lawnmowing service where the overweight worker happens to be a worshipper of Pan, the ancient Greek god, and has rather unorthodox methods of mowing grass.  Suburban is a little freaked out and tries to call the police.  A nasty death by lawn-mover shortly ensued.  Interestingly, I recalled a scene in Maximum Overdrive where a boy gets chased by a bloodied murderous lawnmower.

“Quitters, Inc.” was also featured in the anthology movie, Cat’s Eye.  It’s probably one of his best stories, as it has it all: socio-commentary on the pervasiveness of smoking in the 70s, satire, ethical dilemmas, the evils of behavioural psychology, and of course, the horror of seeing how your addiction can harm those you love.

“I Know What You Need” was an interesting portrayal of a relationship manipulated by an obsessive stalker.  A social misfit manages to insinuate himself into the life of a popular college student, Elizabeth, because he always seems to know exactly what she needs.  But Ed keeps his distance because Elizabeth already has a boyfriend who wants to marry her.  When her boyfriend dies of a car accident, Ed appears to comfort her.  Elizabeth becomes attached to Ed, but a close friend of hers knows something is off when she observes how Ed is able to manipulate situations to make him seem like the perfect catch.  Elizabeth’s father hires a detective to do a background check on Ed proving that Ed is not who he seems.  Turns out, Ed has been using black magic and voodoo to manipulate Elizabeth so that she would depend on him and to dispatch anyone that gets in his way.  Elizabeth manages to destroy the voodoo doll in her likeness and summons the courage to leave a defeated Ed.  The story was decent but I didn’t find the ending satisfying (what’s to stop this loser from doing his black magic again?).

“Children of the Corn” was quite effective and creepy.  I’m a little curious about the movie, but it has very mixed reviews.  Still, I enjoyed Maximum Overdrive despite the low ratings, so I’ll likely watch CofC at some point.

"The Last Rung on the Ladder" may probably be the most overlooked story because there’s nothing supernatural nor particularly scary in the content.  A man receives a distressing letter from his estranged sister, Katrina aka Kitty.  Larry’s about to call his Dad, but stops because he realizes the content of the letter might kill him, as his Dad has had two heart attacks already.  Larry proceeds to recount his childhood growing up with his little sister on a Nebraskan farm.  They loved to climb to the top of a ladder in their barn to leap off from a crossbeam down into a haystack.  One time, the last rung from the top breaks off and Kitty is left hanging 70 ft up in the air.  Larry piles up hay at bottom of the ladder and tells Kitty to let go and she does. The hay breaks Kitty's fall and saves her life, leaving her with only a broken ankle. Larry is astonished when Kitty tells him that she hadn't looked down before letting go, so she didn't know about the hay. She had simply trusted him to save her.  When they grow up, however, the siblings drift apart emotionally and geographically.  Larry becomes a successful lawyer while Kitty’s life did not work out due to bad life choices.  Her letters to him go unanswered and he even neglected to inform her that he had moved.  We learn that the last letter he received from Kitty arrived two weeks after he learned of her suicide in a newspaper article ("Call Girl Swan Dives to her Death") and the content of the letter nearly breaks him (which is finally revealed at the very end of the story). 

I thought this story was particularly effective in its delivery and how it was structured.  Even though the horror was subtle, it was there (the horror of knowing that you could have helped a loved one had you only paid attention).

“The Man Who Loves Flowers” is another story told from the POV of an unreliable narrator who turns out to be a serial killer.  This is proving to be my least favourite genre of Stephen Kings stories.

“One For the Road” supposedly takes place two years after ‘Salem’s Lot, which I haven’t read.  Some men are at a bar while a blizzard is raging in Maine.  A yuppie stumbles in seeking help after his car was stranded with his wife and young daughter inside the vehicle.  Of course, the car was stuck right by Jerusalem’s Lot, and apparently there are still vampires roaming around.  When the men go out to look for the car, it’s too late, the wife and daughter are missing… It was a pretty tame story.

And finally, “The Woman in the Room” was particularly painful to read because it reminded me too well of my own aging parents, particularly my dad, who has been having nurses coming in 4 times a day to care for him at home because my mom is too frail to look after him herself.   A man is visiting his terminally ill mom at the hospital.  It’s another reality-based story without any supernatural or sinister elements, just the everyday horror of dealing with an aging parent in a hospital. 

14. Silver Nitrate

By Silvia Moreno-Garcia 

13. Out

By Natsuo Kirino

Olman had first heard about Out (1997) from a podcast on notable crime novels, thought the premise would be right in my wheelhouse (he was right!), and got this for me as a Christmas gift.  Originally, he could only find a used copy of Grotesque, which featured an XCU of a woman’s face in goth-like makeup.  It was also a really thick large format paperback, and seemed like a daunting read.  Eventually, he was able to find a used copy of Out post-Xmas.

Despite reading the English translation (2004), Out was simply excellent -- Kirino is clearly a skilled writer.   I was immediately drawn into the narrative which made for a gripping read from start to almost finish (sadly, the ending was somewhat disappointing).  Still, I loved Out, which became one of my favourites of 2024, if not of all time.

The novel begins with four women working the graveyard shift at a bento box factory in the outskirts of Tokyo.  Their friendship was based on how they made an efficient group in the assembly line.  The women all look up to Masako, an aloof, intelligent and somewhat mysterious woman.  In her past life, she worked as an exec at a credit and loan company but got laid off when the Japanese bubble economy collapsed.  At home, she is estranged from her withdrawn husband and teenaged son.  Yoshie, the oldest of the group, is known as Skipper at the factory because she was such a reliable and indispensable worker.  At home, she’s a widow burdened with caring for her bed-ridden mother-in-law.  She has an estranged daughter who later comes to her for money. Yayoi is the youngest, gentlest and prettiest of the group, whom the two older women have taken under their wing.  She’s a mother of two young children who’s been struggling with a gambling, abusive husband.  Finally, there’s Kuniko, an opportunist living beyond her means who dreams of a better life but is stuck with a dead-end job and an unattractive body.  Kuniko fell into the group by dint of Masako and Yoshie, quickly assessing that fraternizing with them would secure a cushy position in the assembly line.

Kirino described the factory worker life in the same detailed, detached way that she would later use to recount the cutting up of a dead body (getting ahead of myself here!):

The four women always worked together and tried to help each other out, otherwise the job would have been even tougher. The door opened and the workers filed in. They washed again up to the elbows, and their ankle-length aprons were disinfected. By the time Yayoi and Masako finished washing and moved on to the factory floor, the other women had already begun preparations at the conveyor belt…

     “We're starting with curry lunches. Twelve hundred of them. I'll take rice, and you work boxes, okay?” 'Rice' meant being at the head of the line as the linchpin of the whole process, the one who determined the speed of the line. Yoshie, who was particularly good at it, always volunteered for rice duty, while Masako took the job of handing her the containers…

     Beyond Yoshie was a long line of workers: one to even out the rice, one to add the curry sauce, one to slice the deep-fried chicken, another to lay it on top of the curry. Then someone to measure out the pickles into their cup, someone to add the plastic lid, someone to tape on a spoon, and finally someone to place the seal on the box. Each meal made its way down the line, assembled in so many small increments, until at last a curry lunch was complete…

     This was the way the shift always began. Masako glanced around at the clock on the wall. Barely five after twelve. Still five and a half hours of standing on the cold concrete floor. They had to take turns going to the bathroom, one at a time, with a replacement filling in on the line. You had to announce that you wanted to go and then wait your turn, which sometimes took as long as two hours in coming. They'd discovered long ago that to make the job as bearable as possible meant not only looking out for themselves but also working together as a team. This was the secret to lasting at a place like this without ruining your health.

     About an hour into the shift, they began to hear sounds of distress from the new woman. Almost immediately, efficiency began dropping on the line and they had to cut the pace. Masako noticed that Yayoi, trying to help out, had begun reaching across to take some of the newcomer's boxes, though today she'd seemed hardly able to handle her own. The veterans on the line all knew that smoothing the rice was a particularly tough job since it had cooled into a hard lump by the time it left the machine. It took a good deal of strength in the wrists and fingers to flatten the little squares of cold, compact rice in the few seconds the box was in front of you, and the half-stooping position made it hard on the back. After about an hour of this, pain would be shooting from your spine through your shoulders, and it became difficult to lift your arms. Which was precisely why the work was often left to unsuspecting beginners - though at the moment, Yayoi, who was anything but a beginner, was hard at work at the station, with a sullen but resigned look on her face.

     At last they were finished with the twelve hundred curry lunches. The women on the line cleaned the conveyor and quickly moved to another station for their next assignment: two thousand special 'Lunch of Champions' boxes.

One night, before Yayoi’s night shift at the factory, her deadbeat husband Kenji came home early as he was flat broke due to gambling away their life savings at a baccarat game.  Their argument quickly ended with Kenji punching Yayoi in the stomach.  Seized with rage and helplessness, Yayoi later killed Kenji by strangling him with her belt. Unbeknownst to her, earlier that night Kenji had also been stalking a hostess at a night club and was kicked out by the owner, Satake, who we soon learn has been harboring a dark secret.

Yayoi’s first instinct was to call Masako to tell her what happened, ie. her dead husband’s body was lying on the floor of their home.  It didn’t take long for Masako to make the decision to help Yayoi by putting the body in the trunk of her car and finding a way to dispose of it.

All this happened within the first fifty pages of the book.  You can probably figure out how the rest of the story would play out with the other women somehow getting involved in this crazy cover up.  Yet Kirino spent so much time inside each character, that you undersood each individual backstory, personality and motivation.  Here’s one of Yoshie:

None of them could get along without her - when you thought about it, that was her reason for living. It was that way too at the factory. They called her Skipper, and she did, in fact, run the line. The role kept her going, helped her survive the dreary work; it was her one source of pride. But the painful truth was that there was no one to help her. Instead, all she had was her pride, goading her to keep working no matter how hard it was. Yoshie had wrapped up everything personal that mattered in a tight package and stored it away somewhere far out of sight, and in its place she had developed a single obsession: diligence. This was her trick for getting by.    

 

Even Kuniko, perhaps the most unlikeable of the four women, was embued with some fairly rich interiority despite being so pathetically shallow. Kirino was able to inhabit Kuniko’s thought processes and flesh out her flaws, motives and desires.  You may not like Kuniko, but you understood her. 

 

     Kuniko popped one of her husband's cassettes into the stereo and a shrill female voice filled the car with a cloying pop tune….At the best of times, she wasn't really interested in music anyway. She had only put it in to mark her liberation from the night's work and to test the gadgets in her car. Adjusting the vents on the air-conditioner in her direction, she put down the top of the convertible, watching as it slowly withdrew like a snake shedding its skin. She loved this kind of moment when something ordinary could be made to seem dramatic and exciting. If only her whole life could be that way.

     Still, she thought, going back to Masako, why do you suppose she always wears jeans and her son's old shirts? Come winter, she added a sweatshirt or some ratty sweater, over which - worse yet she'd throw on an old down jacket with patches of tape to keep the feathers from spewing out. That was really too much. It made her look like one of those scrawny trees at Christmas: her skinny shape, the slightly dark skin, the piercing eyes, the thin lips and narrow nose - no excess anywhere. If she would only use a little make-up and wear something expensive, more like Kuniko's own clothes, she'd look five years younger and quite attractive. It really was a shame. Kuniko's feelings toward the woman were complicated, part envy and part antipathy.

     But the real point, she thought, is that I'm ugly. Ugly and fat. Peering into the rear-view mirror, she felt that wave of hopelessness which always swept over her. Her face was broad and jowly, but the eyes that peered back at her were tiny. Her nose was wide and sloping, but her mouth was small and pouty. Everything's mismatched, she thought, and it all looks hideous after a long night shift. She pulled a sheet of facial paper from her Prada make-up pouch and patted around the shiny areas!

     She knew how things worked. A woman who wasn't attractive could not expect to get a high-paying job. Why else would she be working the night shift in a factory like this? But the stress of the job made her eat more. And the more she ate, the fatter she got. Suddenly feeling furious with everyone and everything, she jammed the car in gear, released the brake, and stomped on the gas. She checked the mirror as the Golf shot out of the parking lot, delighted at the little cloud of dust she left behind.

     She turned on to the Shin-Oume Expressway and drove toward the city for a few minutes before turning right in the direction of Kunitachi. Beyond the pear orchards on the left, a tight cluster of old apartment blocks came into view. The place Kuniko called home.

     She hated living there, truly hated it. But at the end of the day, given what she and Tetsuya, her live-in partner, earned, it was all they could afford. She wished suddenly that she were a different woman, living a different life, in a different place, with a different man. 'Different', of course, meant several rungs up the ladder. These rungs on the ladder were everything to Kuniko, and only occasionally did she wonder if there was something wrong with her incessant daydreams about this 'different' life.

 

Masako, as the “leader of the pack”, was just so wonderfully complex.  She might be the first literary character whom I could really identify with as a middle-aged woman!   Intelligent, calm, resourceful, Masako seemed grounded yet there was something bubbling inside her.  Somehow her life had not gone the way she thought it would.  Something went wrong in her relationship with her husband and son and she doesn’t know how to repair it, or worse, she knows, but is not willing to try.  Kirino made clear there wasn’t much opportunity for smart, resourceful women like Masako in Japanese society. 

But here was where Out disappointed me (spoilers beware!).  It turned out the night club owner, Satake, had raped and murdered a woman as a young man named Sato.  He was never caught because he had never repeated his crime nor told anyone.  By Sato’s twisted logic, he saw his victim as a kind of “first love”. And committing this violent act unlocked a dark side of him that he had since kept locked up… until Masako crossed his path.  This happened because the police eventually discovered Kenji’s dismembered body (parts of which were disposed carelessly by the unreliable Kuniko!).  They originally arrested Satake as a prime suspect because of his altercation with Kenji on the night he was murdered.  This caused Satake to lose his night club business and the quiet yet lucrative life he had built for himself.  His anger woke up the monster lurking inside him, and led him to track down the four women after being released from police custody.  He became obsessed with Masako, who bore some resemblance to his original victim.  There was a cat and mouse setup that eventually led to Satake kidnapping Masako in order to re-enact his first crime inside an abandoned section of the bento factory grounds.

Kirino has also been setting up Masako’s character for this inevitable confrontation.  As the reader, we know that even though there’s no monster lurking inside Masako, there was nevertheless a dark side to her calm, aloof façade that has also been kept bottled up.  There was some prescience in the possibility of Masako and Sato/Satake being unlikely kindred spirits in their obsession with pain and self-destruction. Yayoi's crime had set off a chain of events that were primarily orchestrated by Masako.  After all, she was the one who offered to dismember Kenji’s body inside her tiled bathroom (some blood-curdling imagery in that scene!) and recruited Yoshie to help her in this highly gruesome task. When their crime attracts the attention of Masako’s old work acquaintance, it’s Masako who decided that they could earn some money disposing bodies for crime organizations.

Thankfully, Masako still had a desire for self-preservation after being raped by Satake and managed to gravely injure her captor as she tried to escape.  But here was the crazy part: Masako ended up falling in love with her killer/rapist as he lay dying…. like a twisted version of Jane Eyre!  And the attitude to rape seemed very Japanese, almost cliched, ie. deep-down women want to be dominated by a man.  Masako and Satake were two sides of the same coin, two societal outcasts who’ve been circling one another until they connect, rather violently too.  I imagine North Americans would be turned off by the ending and from reading some Goodreads reviews, quite a number of them were, while a few loved the way it ended:

abrikosmanden666:  "i completely agree with you. so many ways for them to realize their similarity (if they even have that, idk. maybe just perceived similarity) without it playing out through that torture scene. i had a lot of respect for masakos character and her realizations but i feel like the ending is sort of disrespectful to her character and her principles. and generally i don’t like that sexual assault (especially when it’s this grim) is portrayed as anything good or eye-opening. even if it’s just masakos character finally crossing over into completely insane. there’s other ways to do it “

Otherwise_Design2232:  "It's the perfect ending in my opinion. The point is (I think) that there is something sacred in the intimacy of sharing someone's death. Satake experienced that with the woman he killed before and she did as well. At some point pleasure and pain merge and the outcome is probably unimaginable (although Kiriko did amazing work in putting it into words) . So I believe through the pain, suffering and the extasy of pleasure there is a point where they actually merge together and become one. And that's where the understanding of the other person and the love comes from."

The obsession with death and self-destruction from a women’s POV isn't particular to Japanese lit.  It has also been portrayed in "Western" novels like Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat (1970) and Martin Amis’ London Fields (1989).

Masako wasn’t exactly a “murderee” like Lise or Nicola Six, but she definitely had the death urge. A Goodreads reviewer’s summary of Lise could very well apply to Masako:  

 

self-destruction as self-actualization

 

The ending wasn’t all bad.  Masako survived, even triumphed, keeping Yayoi’s insurance money that Satake had stolen to start a new life for herself.  The disappointing part was her inexplicably primal connection with a monster like Satake.  The story ended with Masako in the Shibuya district, hoping to get a sense of Satake’s old haunts when he was alive, like a lovesick teenager.  Ugh. I felt that Masako could have an affinity for Satake without falling in love with him.  You can have an affinity with someone and still hate, or reject, who they are, or recognize that you’d be utterly incompatible together in real life.  There was no way that these two weirdos could’ve had a life together, their “relationship” would’ve been doomed from the start!

Despite my disappointment at the ending, Out had everything else going for it.  Excellent writing, a well-constructed plot, great pacing, a sense of place (Tokyo society in the early 90s), well-developed characters… the dynamic of the four women really anchored the story. As one review noted:

[Kirino] constructs real, complex, contradictory, and authentically credible female characters who transgress the social hierarchies of Japanese culture while also defying the sexist and stock stereotypes of women as helpless victims in both slasher and thriller genres.

Even the side characters were well thought out.  Like Kazuo, a Japanese-Brazilian laborer who also worked in the factory.  Kirino was able to flesh out the socio-economic backdrop of Brazil and Japan by describing Kazuo’s personal history in a few paragraphs:

 

Kazuo asked an acquaintance about the situation in Japan and was told that it was the most prosperous country in the world. The stores were full of every imaginable product, and the weekly salary there was nearly as much as he made in a month at the print shop in Sao Paolo. Kazuo had always been proud of his Japanese heritage, and if the opportunity ever arose, he thought he'd like to see the place his ancestors had come from.

     A few years later, he ran into the man he had consulted about Japan, who this time was driving a brand-new car, having just returned to Brazil after spending two years working in a Japanese car factory. Kazuo was jealous. The economic situation in Brazil was bad, with no prospects of improving, and he could only dream of owning a car on the little he made at the print shop. He decided then and there that he, too, would go to work in Japan. If he could last two years, he could get a car for himself, and if he stayed longer, he might even earn enough for a house - and he would see his father's homeland into the bargain.

     He had worried that his mother would be against his going, but when he told her what he was thinking, she agreed almost at once. Though he didn't know the language or the culture, his blood was half Japanese, she told him, so the people there would treat him as part of the family. That was only natural. There were successful Brazilian Japanese who had managed to send their children to college and secure a place for them among the country's elite, but Kazuo's situation was different. He was the son of a barber from the poor part of town, and it made all the sense in the world for him to go abroad to seek his fortune. Then he could return to Brazil with his savings and make a success of himself. He would be following in the footsteps of the man whose independent spirit he'd inherited.

     Kazuo quit the print shop where he had worked for six years, and six months ago he had arrived at Narita Airport. It had been an emotional moment, with him thinking of his father coming all alone to Brazil at the age of nineteen. Kazuo was twenty-five when he arrived in Japan as a guest worker on a two-year contract.

     But he soon found that the land of his forefathers didn't pay much attention to the fact that its blood was running in his veins. At the airport, on the streets, he knew he was seen as a gaijin, a foreigner, and it burned him up. 'I'm half Japanese,' he wanted to shout. 'I'm a Japanese citizen.' But to these people, anyone who didn't share their facial features, who didn't speak their language, just wasn't one of them. In the end, he decided the Japanese as a whole tended to judge most things by their appearance; and the idea of fellowship, which his mother had taken for granted and which involved going beyond appearances, was something few people here were actually willing to follow up on. The day he realised that his face and physique would forever consign him to the status of a gaijin, Kazuo gave up on Japan. It didn't help matters that his job at the boxed-lunch factory was less interesting than the work he'd done at the print shop back in Brazil. It was mindless, back-breaking work that seemed designed to break your spirit, too.

I was wondering if Kazuo would show up to help Masako when she was captured by Satake, and fight him off.  That would’ve been cool (and would've probably made a more satisfying alternate ending in a movie adaptation*), but I realize it was important that the ending be only about Masako and Satake.  Ulimately, it meant that Kazuo was not actually critical to the plot, but he nevertheless helped augment the narrative.

There were so many well-written passages that I couldn’t include them all in this review.  So I’ll have to keep them in my Word document for my own reference.

Kirino’s other novel, Grotesque, is still at my MIL’s house.  I just hope it's still there so either hubs or myself can bring it back someday!

* There was indeed a 2002 Japanese movie adaptation of Kirino's Out, but apparently it wasn't very good, nor did it sound very faithful to the source as it's categorized as a "comedy thriller"!  It's a shame, because I think Out would make a great psychological thriller in the right hands.  Due to globalization, the themes explored in Out are universal and could apply very well to other countries