2. The King in Yellow

By Robert W. Chambers

Saw this hardcover edition while browsing Walden Pond Books in   Oakland.  We (the Purves-Brebner clan) were in the area to pick up a Christmas tree at Brent's near the Grand Lake Theatre and had also consumed some delicious Asian-inspired pastries at Bake Sum.

So yes, I saw The King in Yellow and got Olman to pick it up for me as a Xmas present.  I also found a used copy of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, which happened to be on Olman's list.  Too bad for him though, finders keepers!
I first heard about The King in Yellow as a literary influence on True Detective S1, and it's been on my list ever since.  

Recently, I acquired a HP Lovecraft box set under purely consumeristic circumstances. I was taking advantage of Black Friday sales to do some early Xmas shopping and Indigo had a sale on Kpop albums, which is what my daughter is into collecting now.  Albums qualify for shipping, but I needed another $12 to reach the minimum amount for free shipping.  I saw that certain paperback box sets were half price so I got a HP Lovecraft box set for only $12.50 and as a minor horror buff, I've always been curious about his work.  Anyway, I was aware that author Robert Chambers was an early influence on Lovecraft, so I thought it was a nice coincidence when I saw this nice Pushkin Press edition from 2017 at Walden Books.

The King in Yellow was my first completed book in 2026 (not counting The Antifa Comic Book) and I was able to finish it within a few days.  It's really a collection of four short stories.  The original 1895 publication contained more stories but apparently it's just the first four that are thematically connected by a cursed play called 'The King in Yellow' which somehow ends up in the hands of various characters. When someone reads the second act, terrible things befall them, ie. they start losing touch with reality and become haunted by a ruined, mythical city called Carcosa, unwittingly serving a cult-like deity known only as Hastur, the Yellow King.  Apparently, the world of Carcosa was inspired by Ambrose Pierce. 

The first and probably best story was "The Repairer of Reputations".  The setting is a dystopic 1920s America that has become quite militaristic and Randian (before Ayn Rand and the military-industrial complex came about).  People of Jewish descent and other undesirable foreigners have been deported and a state has been established for African-Americans. The narrator, Hildred Castaigne, observes the official opening of a "Lethal Chambers" at a public park in Manhattan, for anyone who wants to painlessly end their life so as not be a burden on society.  We soon learn that our dear Hildred is not quite right in the head.  Not only had he suffered a head injury from a fall, he had also been committed for a period of time inside an asylum.  At some point he had also read "The King in Yellow" and often visits the creepy Repairer himself, a Yellow King devotee who happens to live above the store that's run by the father of his brother's fiancée.  I like the part when Hildred thought he was alone inside his shabby apartment admiring himself in mirror as he wore his golden crown but when his brother came upon him, he was really just wearing a cheap, dime-store trinket. The reader is basically plunged inside the unraveling mind of a man who's becoming more and more paranoid and deranged until he commits a terrible act.

As a Goodreads reviewer wrote: it is a bracing and imaginative bit of darkness on the page and, to me at least, quite wonderful. the style is so breezy, the pacing so brisk, the imagination so fertile and so oddly modern, the experience was pure pleasure. it is hard to believe that this story was written over a 100 years ago.

The next story, "The Mask", was ok and probably my least favourite as it was more melo-dramatic than creepy or chilling.  It takes place in Paris and involves a love triangle between young painter named Alec, a sculptor and would-be alchemist named Boris, and their love interest, Genevieve.  Boris has discovered or created a magical solution that can transform any organic object or living thing into lightly veined white marble.  It's unclear how the golden liquid came about, but it's strongly implied that it came from the same world that brought about "The King in Yellow".  Tragedy soon befalls the hapless trio. 

Next was "In the Court of the Dragon", also set in Paris, about a man pursued by a sinister church organist who is after his soul.  That pretty much sums up what is probably the shortest of the four stories and the least developed.

Last was "The Yellow Sign" and we're back in Manhattan (Greenwich Village) in "contemporary" times, ie. the 1890s. This time, an artist and his model are troubled by a sinister churchyard watchman who resembles a "plump white grave-worm".  Tessie keeps having the same recurring dream where she sees Scott lying inside a funeral casket being taken away by a horse-drawn carriage.  As their relationship develops, Tessie gives Scott "a clasp of black onyx, on which was inlaid a curious symbol or a letter in gold", which she happened to find one day near Battery Park.  Then soon after, Scott finds The King in Yellow in his collection, "a book bound in serpent skin, standing in a corner of the top shelf of the last bookcase." It is, inexplicably, "The King in Yellow", a book he has studiously avoided: "If I ever had had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages."

So we have come full circle, and our two young lovers are doomed towards a sad demise. This wiki site has a good plot summary.

The King in Yellow collection was an enjoyable read.  I did not expect it to be so readable.  TBH, I expected it to be less accessible and weirder, because after all, The King in Yellow is supposedly a classic example of weird fiction.  The stories were macabre in tone, full of creeping dread and gothic romanticism, with characters who are often artists or decadents, inhabitants of the demi-monde.  But the supernatural or occult references were very subtle and minimal.  This was not a bad thing, just not what I expected.  Still, very glad I read this.
 

16. The Woman in Black

By Susan Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Julia

By Peter Straub

I had assumed the 1975 film, The Haunting of Julia, would be hard to find, but to my surprise it appeared on Tubi last autumn.  I really liked it.  The opening credits revealed that it was adapted from a novel by Peter Straub, which I promptly ordered (to arrive at my MILs as it’s much easier to find vintage books in the US).  Even Olman remarked on the cool cover.  Turned out this was Peter Straub’s first novel.  I had read Ghost Story a long time ago, so long ago that it didn’t even have its own entry.

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Some other creative differences between movie vs book:

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

I liked the movie better.

 

2. The Cipher

By Kathe Koja

 

Like Elizabeth Engstrom, I first heard of Kathe Koja in Monster, She Wrote where she was featured in the chapter “Kafka of the Weird".   Koja was also mentioned in Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks from Hell.

 

The Cipher (1991) was Koja’s debut novel and it garnered some praise and awards.  Despite having a cult following, the original Abyss Line (Dell) edition went out of print.  There was an ebook version in 2012, but The Cipher did not get another reprint until 2020 with the Meerkat Press edition, which is what I have pictured.  The Cipher was part of the same book order as Engstrom’s When Darkness Loves Us, so it made sense that I had to read them back-to-back.

 

 

Behold the Funhole.

 

“Shit,” Nakota said, as she always did, her prayer of wonder. She knelt, bending low and supporting herself on straight-stiff arms, closer than I ever did, staring at it. Into it. It was as if she could kneel there all day, painful position but you knew she didn’t feel it, looking and looking. I took my spot, a little behind her, to the left, my own prayer silence: what to say before the unspeakable?

 

Black. Not darkness, not the absence of light but living black. Maybe a foot in diameter, maybe a little more. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you looked at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive, not even something but some—process. Rabbithole, some strange motherfucking wonderland, you bet. Get somebody named Alice, tie a string to her . . . We’d discussed it all, would discuss it again, probably tonight, and Nakota would sit as she always did, straight-backed as a priestess, me getting ripped and ripping into poetry, writing shit that was worse than unreadable in the morning, when I would wake—more properly afternoon, and she long gone, off to her job, unsmiling barmaid at Club 22 and me late again for the video store. She might not come again for days, or a day, one day maybe never. I knew: friends, yeah, but it was the Funhole she wanted. You can know something and never think about it, if you’re any good at it. Me, now, I’ve been avoiding so much for so long that the real trick becomes thinking straight.

 

Beside me, her whisper: “Look at it.”

 

I sometimes thought it had a smell, that negative place; we’d made the expected nervous fart jokes, the name itself—well, you can guess. But there was some kind of smell, not bad, not even remotely identifiable, but there, oh my yes. I would know that smell forever, know it in the dark (ho-ho) from a city block away. I couldn’t forget something that weird.

 

For the millionth time: “Wouldn’t it be wild to go down there?”

 

And me, on cue and by rote, “Yeah. But we’re not.”

 

I wish I had read The Cipher during my teens or early twenties.  I would’ve loved it, much more than I do now.  It’s nihilistic, angsty, darkly funny and very 90’s in its sordid edginess.  In the Meerkat Press edition, author Maryse Meijer penned a personal and insightful afterword about discovering The Cipher when she was thirteen.

I realized that what I had been looking for all along wasn’t a chainsaw wielding maniac or a tortured vampire or a severely haunted house, but something more existentially threatening: what I needed was a Funhole.

 

The Funhole is not a villain, not a creature, not even a thing, per se, but it is terrifying: perfectly round, absolutely dark, and infinitely deep, anything that goes inside it—or merely near it—is changed: insects grow extra heads, dead flesh comes alive, steel melts and dances and burns.  It’s capable of offering pain and a breed of pleasure beyond the limits of reason; but to receive its gifts one must surrender to the unknown. A journey that doesn’t just offer transformation, but demands it. We know, more or less, what the Funhole does, but not why it does it: the Funhole does not ascribe meaning to itself. That is a job left to Nakota and the Dingbats ad Malcolm and the rest, who scramble to make grand interpretations, all of which are, to varying degrees, bullshit… But nobody in the novel gets what they want, not even the Funhole, as Nicholas is only fleetingly, never lastingly, a willing lover; he remains merely the beloved, as Nakota is beloved by him, as the Funhole is beloved by Nakota. Love, in The Cipher, is never requited; and this is one of the novels’ many horrors, a portrait of desires that are almost always selfish and frustrated, bottomless pits into which each individual pours her darkest wishes for transcendence.

The Cipher reminded me of a more existentially mundane, early Clive Barker.  In spirit, it’s more akin to Charles Burns’ Black Hole, a comic exploring the teenage psyche in 1970's suburban America in an existentially supernatural manner. There's no physical black hole, but rather the Black Hole represents the societal fears of the times, ie. STDs and AIDs.  A mysterious plague disfigures and transforms adolescents into monstrous horrors, the perfect narrative device of externalizing the internal angst of the teenager.

 

Having watched Anora a couple of months ago, I couldn’t help but envision Mikey Madison as ruthless and volatile Nakota. 

Nakota, who saw it first: long spider legs drawn up beneath her ugly skirt, wise mouth pursed into nothing like a smile. Sitting in my dreary third-floor flat, on a dreary thrift-shop chair, the window light behind her dull and gray as dirty fur and she alive, giving off her dark continuous sparks. Around us the remains of this day’s argument, squashed beer cans, stolen bar ashtray sloped full. “You know it,” she said, “the black-hole thing, right? In space? Big dark butthole,” and she laughed, showing those tiny teeth, fox teeth, not white and not ivory yellow either like most people’s, almost bluish as if with some undreamed-of decay beneath them. Nakota would rot differently from other people; she would be the first to admit it.

 

The Cipher was beautifully written as it skillfully balanced the existential horror of an inexplicable black hole in the basement of a seedy residential building and the darkly comic cast of disaffected, deadbeat characters who exploit the Funhole for their own benefit.  My main complaint was that the writing got somewhat bogged down and repetitive as it drew out Nicholas’ achingly slow transformation via his disjointed and indulgent internal thought processes.  Nicholas’ emptiness and abject self-deprecation counterpointed with Nakota’s sociopathy and bitchiness got rather tiresome as I neared the end.  The ending was a bit disappointing too.  The Cipher had a great premise that didn’t quite deliver yet I was nevertheless immersed in the dark decaying urban microcosm Koja had conjured up.  The story was unusual, uncanny and uncomfortable.  There wasn’t much in the way of gore or violence, but there was a fair amount of gross-out body horror and depravity.  It definitely was not an easy read as observed by this reddit thread.

But still, I’m glad I read it. 

 

23. Doctor Sleep

By Stephen King

Recycling my Letterboxd post with some slight revisions below as I also talk about Doctor Sleep, the novel.  I also added some excerpts that I liked:

I first watched the theatrical version on Netflix in 2021, expecting it to be rather meh yet entertaining. I was pleasantly surprised to find how invested I was in the story, which takes place decades after The Shining. 

At the time I hadn't yet read the novel Doctor Sleep, but I found the psychic phenomenon portrayed in the movie quite easy to understand. Mike Flanagan did a wonderful job bringing the world of Doctor Sleep and The Shining to life, even reconciling the contrasting aesthetics of Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick.
     

And if you ever happen to be one of those unfortunate people who’s ever lost a kid—nothing left but a bike in the vacant lot down the street, or a little cap lying in the bushes at the edge of a nearby stream—you probably never thought of them.  Why would you?...  You’d never think of the RV People, those midlife pensioners and cheery older folks in their golf hats and sun visors with appliquéd flowers on them.
     And mostly you’d be right. There are thousands of RV People, but by 2011 there was only one Knot left in America: the True Knot. They liked moving around, and that was good, because they had to. If they stayed in one place, they’d eventually attract attention, because they don’t age like other people. Apron Annie or Dirty Phil (rube names Anne Lamont and Phil Caputo) might appear to grow twenty years older overnight. The Little twins (Pea and Pod) might snap back from twenty-two to twelve (or almost), the age at which they Turned, but their Turning was long ago. 

I really grooved on the idea of psychic vampires preying on clairvoyantly gifted children. That scene where baseball boy met his end was truly disturbing and horrific (Jacob Tremblay really is the default actor to portray abused, tormented children!). Rebecca Ferguson easily stole the show as the Big Bad Boho (how she sucked in Danny's steam with such reptilian relish!).

Coincidentally, when I was watching Doctor Sleep I was in the midst of reading The Bone Clocks and couldn't help but wonder at the similarity between Stephen King's Steam Stealers and David Mitchell's Anchorites, immortal beings who murder and feed off children gifted with "psychic voltage". There's even an exciting battle at the end between the "good" and "bad" psychics, much like how Dan and Abra face off Rose the Hat and her gang.

     “Oh, and make sure you talk to Walter. Ask him what drugs might keep a rube child nice and docile for a long period of time.”
     “This child doesn’t sound like much of a rube to me.”
     “Oh, she is. A Big old fat rube milk-cow.”
     Not exactly true. A great big white what, that’s what she is.
     Rose ended the call without waiting to see if Crow Daddy had anything ese to say. She was the boss, and as far as she was concerned, the discussion was over.
     She’s a white whale, and I want her.
     But Ahab hadn’t wanted his whale just because Moby would provide tons of blubber and almost endless barrels of oil, and Rose didn’t want the girl because she might—given the right drug cocktails and a lot of powerful psychic soothing—provide a nearly endless supply of steam. It was more personal than that. Turn her? Make her part of the True Knot? Never. The kid had kicked Rose the Hat out of her head as if she were some annoying religious goofball going door-to-door and handing out end-of-the-world tracts. No one had given her that kind of bums rush before. No matter how powerful she was, she had to be taught a lesson.
    And I’m just the woman for the job.

Earlier this summer I found a pristine paperback of Doctor Sleep at a yard sale for two bucks, and was almost done reading it when I learned there was a Director's Cut that had an additional 30 minutes worth of material. I found a copy online and started watching it again. 

I actually prefer the climactic battle from the movie more than the novel. In the book, the Overlook Hotel had burned to the ground due to the boiler exploding. Rose and her gang had built a campground near the site because the land is still permeated with evil vibes. That's where Dan and Abra go to face off Rose, and Billy is also there to provide help. Dan had met with Abra's dying great-grandmother earlier on, who gave him her cancerous steam before she passed away. This was Dan's secret weapon to wipe out the gang. 

In the movie, the Overlook Hotel is still standing, though abandoned. And Rose is unaware of its existence until Dan and Abra lure her there as a trap. I thought the movie wove this version of events together rather nicely. The Director's Cut also added more interaction between Dan and the ghost of his father, who "now" tends bar at the ballroom of the Overlook Hotel.

However, I preferred the ending of the novel to that of the movie. In the movie, Dan sacrificed himself in the boiler room so that Abra could live. It didn't make any sense, as Dan had time to escape and the Overlook was going to be destroyed by the raging fire anyway, along with its ghosts. It didn't seem fair to Dan's character, who never had a chance to live the rest of his life completely free of the Overlook's spell. The book gave Dan that chance, so it's a much more emotionally satisfying ending.  

In any case, the various incarnations of Doctor Sleep gave me some nicely crafted immersive fiction to escape into.  At 528 pages, Doctor Sleep almost rivals The Bone Clocks' 608 pages in length, yet is a much faster read as Stephen King does not over-indulge in literary wordiness.

17. Through The Woods

By Emily Carroll

14. Silver Nitrate

By Silvia Moreno-Garcia 

2. A Haunting On the Hill

By Elizabeth Hand

For Christmas, my BIL had given me The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, a Booker Prize shortlister I wasn’t familiar with. He said I was welcome to exchange it at Mrs Dalloway’s for something that was more in my wheelhouse.  I browsed for a long time before I spotted a single hardbound copy of A Haunting on the Hill.  I had no idea Elizabeth Hand had written an official sequel to Shirley Jackon’s most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House!  It was released only a few months ago in October 2023.

I was a big admirer of Hand’s horror mystery thriller Generation Loss, which first won her the 2008 Shirley Jackson award.  It seemed the planets were aligned for me to read A Haunting on the Hill: it was the exact same price as The Bee Sting, so the clerk was able to do a clean exchange for me. I was really looking forward to starting 2024 with a new release! 

The novel begins with Holly and her girlfriend Nisa taking a weekend break away from NYC.  Holly is a struggling playwright who got a lucky break with a $10,000 grant to produce The Witching Hour -- a passion project inspired by Elizabeth Sawyer, who was accused of witchcraft and executed in 17th c. New England.  Nisa, a singer-songwriter obsessed with murder ballads, will compose the music and perform the songs on stage with the actors.  

While out on a drive, Holly discovers Hill House.  She had been searching for a retreat, a place where her performers could rehearse, do read-throughs and collaborate on the development of the play.  She manages to find the local real estate agent, Ainsley, who happens to own Hill House.  Ainsley is reluctant at first, but agrees to rent Hill House to Holly for the week.

Holly brings on board Stevie, a sound designer who was a former child stage actor, and Amanda Greer, a lauded theatre actor who was involved in an unfortunate accident that somewhat derailed her career.  At first I was a little wary, as the four main characters are self-involved theatre types. What kind of eye-rolling antics would I have to endure with a bunch of clashing egos thrown inside a claustrophobic haunted house?  Holly has been frustrated at her own stagnant career path and considers the grant her one chance at breaking out as a successful playwright, so she’s determined to make this work, no matter if her gut keeps screaming out there's something terribly wrong with Hill House

Holly’s gf Nisa is probably the most annoying character of the four.  Blessed with a beautiful voice, she’s constantly trying to “test the acoustics" by belting out her compositions.  And with an innate talent for penning melancholy folk songs, she has a promising musical career, yet deep-down she’s suspicious that Holly secretly wants to reign her in. She’s also narcissistic and has been having a secret affair with Stevie.

Stevie is one of Holly’s best friends.  As a former child stage actor, he was sexually abused by an older co-star, and has grown up dealing with his past trauma by indulging in drugs and hedonism.  Hill House first “reveals” itself to Stevie by giving him the illusion of a safe space in the form of a secret door that’s meant just for him.

Like Nisa, Amanda also likes to command attention, yet unlike Nisa, she is horribly insecure.  Her being older than the others doesn’t help either.  It’s important to note that all three women are desperate to either revive or kickstart their respective careers, and this desperation is what binds them to Hill House.

Overall, I found A Haunting on the Hill to be extremely disappointing, almost to the point of being badly written. First, I had no connection with any of the characters.  Yes, they were immature, unlikeable theatre people, but writers like Patricia Highsmith had a way of making unpleasant characters relatable, or at the very least, fascinating.  Hand herself had created one of the most deeply flawed characters in Cass Neary, yet I could still relate to Cass’ foibles.   The four main characters in A Haunting on the Hill were too self-obsessed to truly care for anyone.  Second, the story wasn't even remotely creepy, let alone scary.  The black menacing hares of unusual size did absolutely nothing for me.  What made Shirley Jackson’s novel so effective was, as the reader, you were never sure whether the house was truly haunted, or whether all the inexplicable occurrences were all in Eleanor’s mind.

The pacing was also off somehow.  There wasn’t any sense of impending doom that ever got properly built up.  The novel was written in the first person from Holly’s POV, yet equal time was spent inside the heads of Nisa, Stevie and Amanda. Holly didn’t have a particularly unique perspective, so I thought it was strange that Hand didn’t use the third person to narrate (which Jackson did for The Haunting of Hill House).    

   Now she grew angry.  They were supposed to all be in this together, with the same goal: the play.  Yet there was Stevie, upstaging her in the parlor, pulling out all the stops as that damned dog. Her voice and her songs were what knit the entire story together, even Holly had admitted that.

   And where was her reward?  Nisa had brought beauty and a sense of ancient mystery to Holly’s words.  She’d infused them with a power and terror that echoed down through centuries unitl Nisa held them, protected them, shared them with those she thought she could trust with something so precious. 

   But all they could see and hear were their own voices.  Petty. Selfish. Greedy.  Deaf to beauty when it rang out.

Hand went deeply into everyone’s past issues, and Hill House amplified their destructive neuroses and desires, yet everyone still felt so two-dimensional, and awful.  Holly, Nisa, Stevie, and Amanda were bickering and bitchy 88 percent of the time.  The three women who watched over Hill House -- Ainsely, Melissa, and Evadne -- were even more thinly drawn.  They were supposed to be good witches yet their motives or histories were never developed.  Perhaps Hand wanted to keep them mysterious or inscrutable, but they did nothing to propel the narrative.  They didn't even provide any substantial backstory to Hill House.  There was also some vague backstory about a family who had lived in Hill House during the 80's and a teenaged son who had mysteriously disappeared, but this was only briefly alluded to.  Ainsley had agreed to rent out Hill House too easily despite knowing the danger she’d be putting her renters in.  She also never reappeared again.  Only Melissa and Evadne made half-hearted attempts to convince the occupants to leave before the forecasted October snow storm.  When Melissa mentioned “it was too late”, she just took off! 

It would’ve made more sense if Ainsley had more of a connection with the house and was making excuses to rent it out, ie. nothing bad had happened there for a long time, and she needed the money, when in actual fact, the house wanted to be “fed” a la Burnt Offerings (which I still need to watch).  There could’ve been interpersonal conflicts between Ainsely, Melissa and Evadne (which would provide a nice counterpoint to Holly, Nisa and Amanda).  And Melissa and Evadne could’ve swooped in at the last minute to extricate Holly, Amanda and Stevie (because there had to be one sacrificial victim – it’s a horror thriller after all!).  But this never happened.

 Though Stevie himself had felt it, too, in the parlor, that primal thrill as he felt himself fold into someone else. Something else…

     He knew from Holly’s expression that his performance had already surpassed whatever she’d hoped for. He still felt it, a flash of the intense charge he got when he’d nailed a part a shivery current that ran through his entire body, everything seeming to tremble, on the verge of coming apart. The others had laughed when Amanda talked about actors being possessed, but he knew that she was right.

    It had been years since he’d felt it, like a drug he’d forsaken. Only this wasn’t bad for him, like drugs. This was what he’d needed, all along. This was what he’d been secretly praying for, the chance to give himself over to something more powerful than himself. The muse, an old acting teacher called it.

I really liked the idea of having a group of actors unknowingly channelling the latent power of Hill House during their rehearsals, much like the psychics in Jackson’s original story.  The characters were definitely seeing and hearing things that didn’t make sense.  But the sightings of the menacing big black hare didn’t make much narrative or symbolic sense - it just left me scratching my head.  And that secret door leading to a psychedelic passageway just seemed kind of silly.

Many ideas that had any potential ended up feeling half-baked.  I mentioned the pacing - it took far too long for things to happen.  Like Stevie finally opening that damned secret door near the end.   Then the storm came and the strange knocking.  Then Nisa snuck up to the door because she couldn’t stand the fact that Stevie would keep something like this from her, but like an idiot, ended up getting trapped inside the bowels of the house.  It was all kind of rushed.  Too much time was spent on four annoying characters and their bitchy interpersonal dynamics, their flaws and insecurities on repeat.  Not enough effort spent creating an effective or marginally scary horror story.  

In the end, it was Nisa who got “eaten” by Hill House, not Holly.  A year later, Holly was still able to produce her play with Amanda Greer as the star and using recordings of Nisa’s music.  But it wasn’t clear whether Holly had changed or even learned anything because none of the survivors really talked about what happened at Hill House. They just moved on with their lives.

I think an important detail that Hand missed was that it was never proven that Hill House was really haunted.  Anyone who had met their fate at the hands of Hill House was mentally unstable in some way.  Hill House always knew who the most vulnerable person was.  Nisa was too self-involved and full of herself to be an Eleanor Vance.  But as the most annoying character in the novel, I was nevertheless glad the house took her!

It's a shame really, as I really wanted to like this novel. Now I'm going to have to find a way to sell or giveaway this lovely hardcover!

1. Rawblood

 By Catriona Ward

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once Iris asked her father:

What does she want?  From us.

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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