17. The Midnight Library

By Matt Haig

It’s nice to read an international bestseller now and then, to consume something "of the now" so I can feel like a part of the crowd or something (and also have an opinion if the occasion arises).  The Midnight Library was one of two bestsellers I’ve read this past year (the other being Gone Girl).

 

The Midnight Library was also chosen for the last book club meeting at my workplace.  Although I haven’t participated in the book club for some time (I tried once with Wherethe Crawdads Sing),seeing that they were doing The Midnight Library spurred me to read it on my own as I had a copy thanks to my last visit to Encore Books.

 

As expected, The Midnight Library was a breezy read, like a feel-good version of Ken Grimwood’s Replay.  Instead of dying of a heart attack at 43 and reincarnating 25 years earlier in your younger body with all memories intact, with each "re-awakening" having the opportunity for a new do-over, Nora Seed overdoses on sleeping pills and ends up in The Midnight Library, a magical place containing an infinite number of books each representing a parallel life of hers had she made different choices, big or trivial.  The library is managed by someone who was dear to you (in Nora’s case, her school librarian Mrs. Elm, and is also a place where time stops at midnight as she hovers between life and death.  While in this state, Nora can slip into another version of her life in a parallel universe simply by choosing a book and reading the first line.

 

What reminded me of Replay was in one of Nora's lives as a glaciologist, she met a man named Hugo, who was also a “slider” or “life jumper”.  He had the same ability as her, except that he’d done this a lot longer, having sampled dozens, if not hundreds, of lives.  Instead of a library though, Hugo’s quantum Shroedinger-esque in-between state was represented by a Midnight Video Store.  Pretty cute, huh?

 

While Replay was an awesome sci-fi/fantasy novel, The Midnight Library was appealing and cute, as author Matt Haig clearly had aspirations for his novel to be inspiring, life-affirming, etc. etc. I've read feel-good books that have really rubbed me the wrong way, like The House by the Cerulean Sea, which I truly regret reading.  Had I known it was going to be such a saccharine piece of tripe, I wouldn't have read it.  Actually that's not fair to tripe, which I would've probably derived more enjoyment out of consuming.  The House... was something that would've belonged in my very own Book of Regrets.  Or more like Book of Books I Regret Reading!

 

In any case, I don't regret having read The Midnight Library. It was better written than The House by the Cerulean Sea, and I even got emotionally caught up in parts of it.  Also, Matt Haig is really British while TJ Klune is American trying to write British.  I also, by default, like any book featuring a cat.  Still, The Midnight Library had its flaws.  There were parts that were a little too simple, or indulgent, or went on for too long.  For example, the part where it listed all the lives that Nora lead.  Whatevs - I just skimmed that section.  Also, some of the lives Nora lead were too far-fetched.  In one life she was the Olympian swimmer she could’ve been. Ok fine. But in another, she was a famous rock on the same level as Radiohead (and even dated a Hollywood star)!  Some metaphors were also a little too pat.  Like the protagonist's name, for instance.  Nora Seed.  She has to experience the multiple branches of her life before she can truly appreciate her “root life”.  Get it?

 

I can also see how The Midnight Library would’ve been The House by the Cerulean Sea for some readers, as it really does over-simplify the complexities of why someone would want to end their life.  One Goodreads reviewer summed it up nicely:

I liked this book until it suddenly decided to moonlight as a self-help manual, replete with messages that would look great and profound on an Instagram post next to a well-posed cup of coffee with those foam pictures on top. Or embroidered on a pillow — pick your poison.

And these messages have the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Another Goodreads reviewer also had a good point about how The Midnight Library could even be problematic in regards to mental illness:

I also have issues with the core messages in this book. Nora finally learns her lesson, but it's only after having fixated on each regret, remade every decision, and lived all subsequent lives. Like come on, at some point, you just have to be okay with who you are and the decisions you've made without knowing every single possible outcome.

 

But my biggest issue is that I'm really uncomfortable with this book's implication that if you're depressed, you only need to change your mindset and you will feel better. That goes against everything we understand about mental illness, including that it's important to seek professional help, that it can be chemically based, and that it's not a matter of not trying hard enough.

 

We already have enough trouble as a society getting depression and mental illness taken seriously, without a "feelgood" book coming along and implying that you need nothing more than an attitude adjustment to cure it. That puts the blame squarely where it doesn't belong, on the hundreds of millions of people who are suffering from depression. But it isn't just the layman who harbors such misunderstandings. It also includes people who work in the mental health field, and even some therapists and psychiatrists. So you can understand my dismay at the continued popularity of this book, which further perpetrates this extremely toxic point of view 

In any case, I wanted to get this review done so I can pass this book on, probably resell it even.

 

April 2026 update: Encore Books wouldn't take this back as they have copies already.  I thought with Matt Haig's sequel The Midnight Train there might be renewed interest in having multiple copies - apparently not.  So this copy was dropped off at my neighbourhood Free Library shelf.

 

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. The boy in the story was also tempted to open the painted door, 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 the 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 becoming 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?”

5. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

By Ransom Riggs

It's February 1, 2026 and I'm thinking I'd better write a quick review about this bestselling YA fantasy, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, before I forget too much about it.  I also wanted to place my copy in my daughter's bookshelf for her to read someday as I had enjoyed it.  I'm pretty sure I found this trade paperback for free somewhere.

Despite liking the book, I'd forgotten most of the storyline, so had to refresh my memory via the Wikipedia plot summary.

Some quick thoughts:

Reading Ransom Biggs' 2011 novel reminded me a lot 2020's highly over-rated YA fantasy, The House in the Cerulean Sea.

Both novels share a similar premise—a guardian protecting children with magical abilities on a secluded island. The difference is that Cerulean Sea is a cosy, heartwarming fantasy focused on acceptance and queer romance, while Miss Peregrine is a dark, fantasy thriller filled with horror elements and vintage photos. Still it cemented for me yet again how unoriginal Cerulean Sea is and despite borrowing from many influences, it's still hackneyed tripe. 

Like Klune, Ransom Biggs is an American writer feigning a classic style of British storytelling.  Even though the 16 yo protagonist Jacob Portman is Jewish American, he travels to Cairnholm, Wales where he discovers a secret group of "peculiar children", most of whom are British. But unlike Klune, Ransom Biggs is the better writer and Miss Peregrine the better book.

I liked the background story of how Biggs came to write Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Biggs had an archive of old family photos and was himself a collector of antique and vintage photographs. He originally wanted to write a picture book, but his editor encouraged him to expand on the narrative.  With some help from other collectors, Biggs was able to not only write a story about a boy who follows clues based on his grandfather's old photographs and personal tales, which lead him to Cairnholm, a fictional Welsh island (and a fantastic adventure), he also integrated some of the photographs into the pages to flesh out the narrative.  

19. Bastion Falls

By Susie Moloney  

Bastion Falls was on my list for years.  I only heard about it years after it was published (back in 1995) and was intrigued by its premise -- like a Canadian take on a Stephen King story.  The only description I had was “town trapped in snowstorm w/ psychic teen girl”. 

 

Recently, while perusing Abe Books, I found a copy of Bastion Falls for only a few bucks.  It came with my first order (along with St.Lucy’s Home for Girls) and I only realized it was a mass produced paperback after I opened the box.  Inside the back page was a library slip from Eagle Nest Public Library, N.M. with three sign-outs in 2001, 2003 and 2016.   On Goodreads, Bastion Falls had only 78 ratings and 9 reviews.  This was obviously a pretty obscure find, so I was prepared to be disappointed. 

 

     There were northern towns just like Bastion, and yet Bastion stood alone among them. It had in its earlier days a harder edge, a meaner desperation, a need for the fulfillment of some kind of darker order.

     Things change; in that Bastion was no exception. The years piled on years brought it an air of civility that was inevitable. Its past was buried with the ruins of the old fort. What remains of the fort, in irony, are only its walls, the bastions.

 

When a freak September storm envelops the town in snow, strange things start to occur in Bastion, but no one is able to trace it back to the old fort site.  That is, no one except a teenaged girl named Shandy.

The strangest thing about the fort was that no one ever went to see it:  there were no field trips to study Bastion heritage, no commemorative dates to mark on the calendar, no Familis of the Fort to celebrate. People around Bastion almost pretended the fort didn’t exist.  They never denied it was there, and it was brought up, duly, during local history cases, but there was an unspoken agreement that the history of the fort was not up for public view or scrutiny.  It had seemed a town eccentricity, and before today Shandy had never questioned it, it having never been important. But it’s important now.

In recent years, a “mall-like” complex was built in the town centre, constructed out of “good old Bastion Falls limestone” and providing an epicentre for the inhabitants to gather.  The public school and bar were also part of the complex.  When the blizzard descends upon Bastion, many people stayed inside the mall to wait out the storm and pretty soon the mall became a refuge centre.

 

When running late for work, Marilyn got caught in the sudden blizzard, but made it to safety and took refuge inside the mall.  The same morning, Shandy was pressured by her boyfriend to skip school so they could hang out, but she was reluctant to because of the approaching storm.  She relented, and unfortunately, later witnessed her boyfriend overtaken by an unknown entity.

     In the corner of his mouth, for just a second, Shandy saw a black tail-like thing, attached to something bigger, but like a shadow. It moved down his throat to the center of him, she followed it with her eyes as it moved into his chest.

     It reversed. The swell disappeared.

    “David?” she whispered.

     David’s body shrunk into itself, the blood disappearing from his flesh leaving it the color of corn husks, the flesh shrunken.

Shandy is the psychic teenage.  Through her abilities, she sensed that the source of the entities originated from the old fort site and comes to the realization that she must destroy it.     

    Somewhere up around the old fort site. That was where it was coming from. Whatever it was that was happening. (Something to do with the storm, the storm and those things.). That was where she had to go. Shandy knew this, the same way she always knew.

When Marilyn finally met Shandy and saw how determined she was to set off on her suicidal mission, she went with her and helped Shandy set fire to the fort.

 

There were some obvious flaws with the plotline and which ‘genre’ this work of fiction wanted to fit into.  But I was pleasantly surprised to find the quality of the writing quite solid.  There was care and detail in describing the town of Bastion Falls and its various inhabitants. 

Like Candace Bergen, the new principal of Bastion Falls Composite Highschool and “by Bastion standards, the most progressive principal the town had ever known… But by standards formed by the rest of the liberal world, she was conservative to the highest degree."  In describing her personality and dedication to her role, Moloney also painted a general picture of the student body, where chronic truancy, teen pregnancies, substance abuse and dropout rates were relatively high. 

 

Another interesting character was Joe Nashkawa, mall manager.  “Besides running the mall, Joe was chief o the Bastion Volunteer Fire Brigade; in the winter he coached the under-six hockey team, the only team to play inside the rec center’ and he was a band elder…”

 

And then there was Emma, the cheatin’ stay-at-home mom, who killed time by having serial affairs, her latest being occasional handyman and closet toxic male, Tully.

She sometimes thought of divorce, and then having all the affairs she wanted, but she did love Don—it wasn’t anything personal—and hadn’t loved any of the others. She had hardly even liked any of the others. They simply were a part of that other life, add a lift to her day. Her days were desperately lift-less, and her affairs were very, very important to her in their own right.  She wouldn’t give it up, didn’t even want to think about it, even though she did, every single morning when the before of it all was happening and the excitement high and her genitals were throbbing and all of it overwhelming her. She simply could not help herself.

It looked like Emma was gonna get punished for her sins when her lover didn’t handle being dumped well.  Her being trapped by Tully the Unhinged Handyman was probably the most tense part of the novel.  When the entities got him, it was pretty satisfying to read.

 

Last but not least, there was Ed, the manager of the bar that also provided a safe haven for the locals to take refuge and drown their boredom.

Just about all his regulars were there, having been in for most of the day. But a lot of folks were people he hardly ever saw, the twice-a-month folks, the once-in-a-while folks, some of them were in the bar. Most of those folks had come in out of the storm for refuge and found it in booze. There was no helping that: he couldn’t exactly start throwing people out into the worst storm he’d seen in years… Therein lay the problem. What was he going to do with all these people?

It looked like Moloney was going to build up to a big massacre or showdown between the townsfolk and the mysterious entities.  I mean, that’s what Stephen King would’ve done.  Despite all the care and attention that Moloney put into the setting and disparate characters, it never all quite gelled together into a gripping cohesive narrative.  Oddly enough, the only character who was sparse on background and detail was Marilyn, the young divorcee who ended up helping Shandy defeat the entities and save Bastion.  For someone who was the sole remaining witness to what went down at the old fort site, we didn’t know much about her, yet Moloney devoted so many pages to the other side characters, like Emma and Candace, that had nothing to do with the main plotline.

 

When Marilyn and Shandy finally met, it felt kind of rushed considering all the time spend developing the other characters.  What’s more, their attempt to burn down the fort (“fire cleanses”) was somewhat laughable, as Shandy only packed several cans of lighter fluid in her knapsack.  Shandy somehow holds back the demonic entities with her mind while Marilyn sets the fort ablaze in a snowstorm with those cans of lighter fluid.  But it really seemed like they needed something with more oomph, like gallons of gasoline and/or a flame thrower!

 

It was pretty miraculous that two ordinary people were able to defeat a legion of supernatural, soul-sucking entities with a few cans of lighter fluid and the whole thing was disappointingly anti-climactic.  Shandy even died an unsung hero, with the people of Bastion unaware of her sacrifice.  Only Marilyn knew what really happened.

The stones were black with soot, and more of the limestone bricks that had held such misery had fallen over. The acrid smell of smoke was still there, and under it the smell of the lighter fluid. It truly looked like ruins now. Marilyn thought it looked harmless. She knew it felt harmless. Her amazement at the place was mostly because she didn’t feel much changed from that night. She felt no ghosts at her side; her mother didn’t come to her in dreams. She was herself again. The aches were gone. There were no echoes in her head. There seemed no aftermath, except that some people had died; many that she knew, one that she felt responsibility for, even if she’d tried.

Despite it’s anti-climactic-ness, I still found Bastion Falls a low-key page-turner, which makes it very Canadian. Yet the novel is written in a way that doesn’t point out how Canadian it is.  We know that Bastion Falls is a northern prairie town, but which province, it didn’t really matter.  There were clues though, like when Joe always had his radio tuned to CBC, “the only station he would play in the office, damn the others all to hell if they wanted to listen to their shit-kicker music, he liked his news.”

 

Moloney also sidesteps any explanation regarding the supernatural forces.  Were they pre-colonial?  Did early European settles massacre a First Nations village?  Was the fort built over some ancient burial site?  Stephen King would’ve delved into the origins a little, but Moloney is no Stephen King.

 

Still, Bastion Falls made for a good winter holiday read while I was staying at the in-laws. Thanks to Abe Books, I'm glad I finally got to read it, but unfortunately, it ain't a keeper.

16. St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

By Karen Russell

This was part of my first order from AbeBooks that I sent to arrive at my in-laws in the Bay Area.  These books were hard to find used, this one especially, and since Olman was there in October to care for his dad, he was able to bring them back for me. 

 

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is a collection of short stories from 2006 that was recommended by Paul Tremblay in his afterword.  I was intrigued when he mentioned how Russell was inspired by The Bloody Chamber, but also aware that I’d be setting myself for disappointment.  Superficially, Russell's stories did evoke the spirit of Angela Carter with a modern American spin.  There was a light-hearted, fairy tale like quality to the stories which are set all over America.

 

It started off well enough with “Ava Wrestles the Alligator”, about two sisters left to run the family business, a Gator Theme Park called Swamplandia! situated deep in the Florida Everglades.  Their mother died and their dad, Chief Bigtree, hadn’t yet returned from the Mainland.  Ava is the one feeding the gators since her older sister Ossie is too wrapped up with her succubus boyfriend, Luscious.  When Ava catches Ossie wading into the swamp pond as an offer of sacrifice, the story abruptly ends in media res just as Ava pulls her sister out of the water.

 

The next story “Haunting Olivia” was alright, and evidently not that memorable as I had to flip through the story to jog my recall:  two boys, who lost their little sister some months ago, decide to go in search of her in their “boat”.  They think she was trying to reach a place called the Glow Worm Grotto, where you have to swim under water to reach it. The story again seems to end in medias res where the protagonist is alone inside the grotto and realizes that Olivia isn’t there as his goggles are fogging up. 

 

The only thing a bit different about this story is that the flora and fauna are somewhat out of the ordinary, ie. the boys used the shell of a giant crab as their boats, which they rented from Herb’s Crab Sledding Rentals.

 

Next up was a story with a neat premise -- a day in the life of an unnamed boy and his friends at “Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers”, which was also the story's title.

 

The boy shares a bunk with Oglivy (sic), “the only other person I have ever met who shares my same disorder.”  One night, they both woke up screaming at precisely the same time and discovered they had the exact same dream, or “postmonitions” --  disasters and tragedies that already occurred in the past, from the historical (The Bubonic Plague, the Pompeii eruption) to the lesser known (the St. Louis Zoo Cataclysm of ’49).

 

The boy and Ogli are in Cabin 4: Miscellaneous.  The other cabins are known by hierarchy.  Here’s a sample:

Cabin 2: Sleep Apnetics

Cabin 3: Somnambulists

Cabin 6: Somniloquists

Cabin 7: Gnashers

Cabin 13: Night Terrors

Cabin 9: Insomniacs

Cabin 1: Narcoleptics

Cabin 10: Incubuses

 

“Z.Z’s” was creative and clever, and probably my favourite of the what I’ve read in the collection, as truth be known, I didn’t read all of ‘em.  Russell seemed to have fun with it:

This year, we’ve got a New Kid, this Eastern European lycanthrope.  He is redolent of tubers and Old World damp. New Kid’s face is a pituitary horror, a patchwork of runny sores and sebaceous dips. Ginger fur sprouts from weird places, his chin, his ears. You intuit some horror story—homeschooled, his mother’s in a coven, he eats rancid cabbage out of a trough, that sort of thing. He sleep cycles with the moon.

 

By the fourth story, I got a little tired of the style and tone, and wasn’t in the mood for making myself work to get to know another new set of quirky characters.  I started skipping a story here and there, as I was impatient to get to “St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, the final story, as I assumed Russell had saved the “best” for last.

 

The title story is told from the POV of one of the girls at St. Lucy’s, who watches herself and her “pack” of sisters struggle to assimilate and civilize themselves under the watchful eyes of the nuns.  This section sums up the premise:

 

Our mothers and fathers were werewolves. They lived an outsider’s existence in caves at the edge of the forest, threatened by frost and pitchforks. They had been ostracized by the local farmers for eating their silled fruit pies and terrorizing the heifers. They had ostracized the local wolves by having sometimes-thumbs, and regrets, and human children. (Their condition skips a generation.) Our pack grew up in a green purgatory. We couldn’t keep up with the purebred wolves, but we never stopped crawling. We spoke a slab-tongued pidgin in the caves, inflected with frequent howls. Our parents wanted something better for us; they wanted us to get braces, use towels, be fully bilingual. When the nuns showed up, our parents couldn’t refuse their offer. The nuns, they said, would make us naturalized citizens of human society. We would go to St. Lucy’s to study a better culture. We didn’t know at the time that our parents were sending us away for good. Neither did they.

 

As expected, “St. Lucy’s” was charming and well-written, with obvious nods to colonialism and European white-washing.  There was humour, intelligence and magic realism.... but it wasn’t anything like “The Company of Wolves”, and the collection was nothing like The Bloody Chamber either.  Something was lacking for me.  Perhaps I wanted a little less exposition and more mystery?  A little more darkness and sexuality beneath the quirky, light-hearted surface?  

 

In summary, some enjoyable stories there, and Russell is definitely a talented writer, but overall, not quite my cup of tea.

9. Pandemonium

by Daryl Gregory

Pandemonium (2008) is another work of fiction recommended by Paul Tremblay in his afterword for A Head Full of Ghosts.  Although it has an interesting twist on demon possession, Pandemonium isn’t just horror though, it’s a dystopic, supernatural-psychological mystery thriller. 

 

In the world of Pandemonium, demonic possession has spread all over the globe like a viral pandemic since WW2.   “Ordinary men, women, and children are seized by entities that seem to spring from the depths of the collective unconscious—pop-culture avatars that some call demons.”

Like a virus, there are different “strains” of demons that prefer certain types of hosts.  For example, the Little Angel prefers pretty little girls.

 

..Experts agree it was the Painter strain of the disorder. (Those were the official terms—strain, disorder—as if marrying a medieval word like possession with more medical and modern-sounding partners tamed the idea, boxed it up into something tidy enough for science.)  Best guess, there were perhaps a hundred distinct strains—a science-weasel way of saying one hundred demons.

     The CDC recorded over twenty thousand cases of possession a year in the US, some lasting weeks and most lasting only minutes.  Some people were hit repeatedly, as if struck by lightning charged them for life. Most of the time they were seized by the same demon, but sometimes it was a different one every time.

     The government hastened to add that the reports contained an unknown number of false positives, false negatives, incorrect diagnoses. Demons left behind no DNA, no wake of antibodies in the bloodstream, no cellular changes in the brain.  A possession—especially a brief, one-time possession—was easy to hide and easier to fake. Different people were highly motivated to do either. Demons could make you do awful things—but awful things could make you famous. Possession survivors showed up on TV all the time.

 

As a boy, Del Pierce was possessed by a wild, destructive demon known as Hellion.  With unending patience from his family, the demon seemed to have disappeared, and Del grew up into a fairly well-adjusted adult, until he got into a car accident.  Then he starts experiencing these intermittent black outs and he begins to suspect that the demon is still lurking inside him, lying dormant until Del’s head injury jolted it awake again.

 

My own demon’s name caught my eye, in a paper called “Expanding the Post-War Cohort: A Bayesian Analysis of Incident Reports, 1944-50.” …Everybody knew that the big three—the Kamikaze, the Captain, and the Truth—had all appeared around the same time. The paper was arguing that several more ought to be included: Smokestack Johnny, the Painter, the Little Angel, some demon named the Boy Marvel, and my own Hellion… What did it matter? I imagined bearded guys all over academia working themselves into a lather over this, precisely because the stakes were so low.

 

When a world-renowned scientist claims to have a cure for demonic possession, Del asks his brother to accompany him as he seeks out Dr Ram at a science conference.  But before Dr Ram can even agree to anything, he’s killed by someone who was possessed by a demon known as The Truth.  Del then later meets a man named Valis, who’s also attending the conference, and described as “an entity possessing the science fiction writer formerly known as Philip K. Dick.”

 

More importantly, Del meets Mariette O’Connell, an Irish nun who was once possessed by The Little Angel as a child, who proves to be the most instrumental person in helping Del find out what is happening with him.  I couldn’t help but envision a thirty-something Sinead O’Connor in that role.

 

…But Jesus, what a relief!  O’Connell just might be as fucked up as I was. All the things about her that kept me off balance: the costume changes form high priest to rock chick; the sudden lurches into hard Irish aints and yes; the abrupt swing from pastor to sexual aggressor and back again. She didn’t know who the hell she was, kick-ass exorcist or shell-shocked possession survivor.

 

Mariette leads the Pierce brothers to the Human League, an organization that believes powerful telepaths are secretly in charge of the planet, and who have the ability to possess people for their own entertainment and advancement.  The Human Leaguers agree to help Del figure out whether a demon has been trapped inside him all these years.

 

As the story progresses, there was some really nice, subtle world-building with sprinkles of playfulness and clever pop culture references thrown in.  The main narrative is intermittently broken up by a “Demonology” chapter containing an anecdote about each of the primary demons:  the Captain, the Truth, Smokestack Johnny, The Little Angel, and the Boy Marvel.

 

Eventually, Del and Mariette discover a lead (can’t remember the details) that leads them to an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. A clue at the house leads them to an old man at a nearby hospital.  And of course, there’s a juicy twist as we discover who this old man really is.  

 

Basically, the twist is this: 

 

During the 1940’s, there was a boy who lived in that farmhouse, who didn’t realize at the time that he was a powerful telepath.  He was obsessed with comic books, and when he had an accident that left him completely paralyzed, perhaps even stuck with locked-in syndrome, the boy had no outlet and unleashed his fervent imagination out into the world.  So these entities weren’t “demons”, they were characters sprung from the mind of a boy, yet with no corporeal physicality.  Yet instead of hopping from one body to another, the entity known as Hellion decided to stay inside the boy named Del Pierce.  And eventually, this entity became more human the longer he stayed.  His family took this as progress and never questioned that maybe Del was not really Del.  The “demon” who had been trying to get out was actually the real Del Pierce, who had been trapped in limbo all these years.

 

At some point, Del realizes that Valis is also a demon who had permanently taken possession of Philip K. Dick.  Del and Valis proceed to have this crazy conversation that explains everything.  This is for my own reference, so don’t read this passage if you’re planning on reading Pandemonium!

 

     "….An old man.  He’d been paralyzed almost his whole life. He had an accident back in the forties, when he was eleven or twelve.”

     “The golden age of science fiction,” Valis said.

     “He was the source,” I said. “For some of the demons, at least.  My cohort. We were all—I don’t know—stories. Characters. He made us up and then sent us into the world.”

     … “There are some humans who have a gift… Call them whatever you like. Your old man was one, Phil another. Who knows how many are out there? Thousands at least. At this moment, some teenage Japanese girl is pouring over a manga, a Hindu boy is praying Shiva to life. These sensitives are a little closer to the boundaries. Their grip on the consensual world is a little tenuous.”

            “You mean they’re crazy.”

            He shrugged. “Let’s not debate cause and effect. All we know is that when death comes for them, when the darkness calls, some of them do not go gentle. They refuse to be pulled in, and so they pull something back out.”

            “The demons.”

            “Us,” Valis said. “You’re going to have to learn to accept what you are.”

            “Which is what—aliens? Archetypes?”

            “I don’t yet know… You and I are special.  We outgrew our prescribed roles… We stayed too long. As soon as we began to covet the lives we’d interrupted, we began to move beyond monomania, beyond the pasteboard personalities we’d been given…”

 

 All in all, I really enjoyed Pandemonium – a fantastic idea that was more than competently executed!

13. The Bone Clocks

By David Mitchell

Last year I tried selling some trade paperback fiction on PPG, ie. Neal Stephenson, Dawn Powell (I had two copies)... the good stuff. Surprisingly, there were no takers (did no one read during the pandemic?), so I ended up selling them to SW Welch when his store reopened.  Someone on PPG responded saying 'I’m not interested but I’ll lend you my copy of The Bone Clocks, I think you’ll love it.'  I guess from the 5 or 6 books I was trying to sell, she deduced that I’d like The Bone Clocks?  I thanked her but did not take her up on her offer.  Yet I did put The Bone Clocks on my list, knowing that David Mitchell can be a damn fine writer when he wants to be.

When I was in Abbotsford visiting my brother in September, we went downtown for lunch and walked around the area.  We stopped by a pretty good used bookstore, which was where I found this copy of The Bone Clocks.

Overall, I really enjoyed the novel.  But it didn’t need to be 600+ pages, even for a writer like David bloody Mitchell!  I will say that I’d rather read 666 pages of Mitchell than slog through 99 pages of TJ Klune any day!

The Bone Clocks was rather misleading as a contemporary fantasy.  The fantastical elements comprised perhaps about 18% of the novel, at best?  It began conventionally enough:  girl runs away, girl meets boy, girl gets entangled with supernatural forces, girl gets memory wiped, girl grants asylum to immortal being to reside in the back of her mind for two decades.

Then the next chapter takes place about a decade later from the POV of a new character:  a university student named Hugo Lamb who harbors a double life. The fantasy elements take a back seat... of a very long touring bus.  Basically, the bulk of the book is from the POV of men who knew and loved Holly Sykes.  But the fantasy stuff, when they do come back, is really great.  David Mitchel can write and he can do fantasy, ie. believable world-building, a good backstory about ancient beings known as Atemporals, who are basically split between two warring factions.

Having watched Doctor Sleep on Netflix recently, the “psychoteric” war between the Horologists and the Anchorites shared amazing similarities with the psychic battles portrayed in the Stephen King adaptation, so much so that I had to look it up.   Doctor Sleep was published in 2013 and The Bone Clocks in 2014, so they were very close together and apparently, it was really by chance!

According to the Horologists, the Anchorites are “carnivores” because they murder and feed off children who are gifted with psychic voltage.  They then ‘decant’ their souls and drink from the Black Wine and this halts the aging process, as long as they perform this sacrifice every three months.  Unlike the self-serving Anchorites, the Horologists are "good" Atemporals since they allow themselves to age; when their bodies die, their souls enter the body of a child who had just died of natural causes.  Unlike the Anchorites, who get to keep their bodies, their immortality is based on reincarnation.  The Horologists have made it their mission to fight the Anchorites because what they do is simply wrong, if not downright evil.  Regular humans are known as Bone Clocks because they can't perceive this eternal battle that's been waging around their limited perceptions of space and time.  Mitchell did a good job fleshing out the individual Horologists, though the Anchorites were portrayed pretty two-dimensionally. 

In Doctor Sleep, an evil gang of supernatural beings retain their longevity by feeding on the psychic abilities (aka "steam") of children.  Instead of the Horologists, you have middle-aged Danny and his young charge fighting the bad guys.  I found the psychic premise and warfare in the Doctor Sleep movie quite thrilling so would like to read the book one day.  Same for the final “psychoteric” war in The Bone Clocks… when it finally occurred!  The best and worst thing about The Bone Clocks was that it’s the work of David Mitchell.  It’s not that Mitchell can't write a tightly structured, conventional genre novel.  He just won't -- he'd consider it beneath him. So he makes what should be a tightly structured, conventional work of genre fiction into a dense, literary novel.  Rather arrogant, if you ask me!

Back to the amoral, womanizing posh boy, Hugo Lamb.  He eventually gets recruited by the Anchorites, but before this happens, Mitchell goes on and on about his life in great detail. When Hugo meets Holly, many pages are devoted to Hugo wooing Holly, so you'd think that their brief fling would have some significance later.  Then Holly's high school crush, Dave Brubeck, comes back in first-person - now a 30-something war journalist married to Holly and saddled with an adorable toddler daughter.  Dave is torn between two loves and two duties: his family and profession.

Next comes Crispin Hershey, the most superfluous character in the entire novel.  Again, Mitchell devotes countless pages to Crispin’s life as a former Wild Child of literary fiction.  There's even an unnecessary subplot where Crispin’s revenge on a harsh critic ends up sending said critic to a South American prison for 3 years.  The critic was none other than Richard Cheeseman, an old university friend of Hugo Lamb.

You’re led to think that Crispin will have a bigger part to play in the fantasy subplot, but nothing comes of it.  An editor for any other writer would’ve excised this, but because it's David Mitchell, he got to keep all these irrevelant details because he had written so much of himself into Crispin Hershey - a male writer having a midlife crisis, whose star is fading, but his wit is still as sharp as ever, etc.  Most of all, Mitchell could make fun of himself in a self-referential way, like via this very meta scathing review of Hershey's latest novel:

So why is Echo Must Die such a decomposing hog?  One: Hershey is so bent on avoiding cliché that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistleblower. Two: The fantasy subplot clashes so violently with the book’s State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look. Three: What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?

Check, check and check for The Bone Clocks! Even though it could've easily been 200 pages shorter and a better book, would it have been a David Mitchell book?  I did get a tiny thrill when I read that Crispin’s ex-wife and daughters had a “little pied-a-terre in Montreal’s well-heeled Outremont neighborhood”, which I don't live far from. Those details can be fun.

What was disappointing was that nothing ever came out of Hugo’s fling with Holly.  His only connection was that he was recruited by the same Anchorite who had stalked Holly as a child.  Nor did Hugo’s past love for Holly alter the course of the final psychic battle in any way.  He merely followed Marinus out of the Chapel of Dust, managed to escape the collapsing wreckage, became an ordinary human again, and… was never heard from again!   Crispin was even worse.  He simply got killed off by a seemingly random person, Soleil Moore.  The only purpose that his character served was that he was another man who loved Holly in her middle age, and who witnessed Holly having a vision.  At least Dave Brubeck had a daughter with Holly. 

In the reader’s guide at the end, Hugo and Crispin, and to some extent, Dave Brubeck, were men who became better people because of Holly.  But what did this have to do with the novel's overarching narrative or theme?  

The final narrator, the Horologist named Marinus, was what brought everything back full circle. His chapter was the best one, not only because it explained everything, but was also the most creatively interesting because Marinus was convincing in his first life as a man and then as a young peasant girl who makes her way up in 16th c. society.  Marinus appearing in the final chapter when Holly was a grandmother in post-apocalyptic Ireland was pretty cool because he was able to finally return the favour by rescuing Holly's granddaughter and adopted grandson.

In the Guardian article, Mitchell spoke about ‘delayed gratification’ and not doing what other writers were doing.  The one thing I did appreciate with the ‘delayed gratification’ was that when the fantasy stuff came back in full force, it picked up the plot where it left off, made me revisit Holly’s section again, and then her encounter with Esther Little and Marinus made more sense.

The reader may have clean forgot what happened in the early chapters because several hundred pages have passed.  So all the weird stuff that happened to Holly when she was a teen, it all gets explained at the end. Holly, as a child, was plagued by visions and voices.  Immaculée Constantin stalked Holly as the next decanting victim for her immortal cult.  The doctor who treated Holly was Dr. Marinus who neutralized her psychic voltage to protect her from the cult.   Immaculée then kidnapped and murdered Holly’s little brother, who had actually died from hepatitis a year earlier and whose body was inhabited by a powerful Horologist.

This review “gets” The Bone Clocks and sums up what Mitchell was trying to achieve.

I mostly agree with this assessment, but still felt The Bone Clocks could’ve been a truly great fantasy book had it been structurally tighter.  As a literary work, the portrayal of three very different men having been affected by one woman makes an enjoyable enough novel, but certainly not a great one either.  The combination of the fantastical with the 'normal human stuff' makes it unusual and interesting, but that's about it. It was only Mitchell’s talents and humour that made the sloggy filler bits bearable, much like how I felt about Cloud Atlas. 

So glad I was able to finish before flying off the CA to join my fam for the holiday.