6. Apt Pupil

By Stephen King

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.  

4. Zombie

By Joyce Carol Oates

3. The Driver's Seat

By Muriel Spark

The 1974 film, Identikit, had been on my watch list for some time with this intriguing description: "Liz Taylor as suicidal spinster; hard to find." 

 

I was sure I'd first learned of the film via Kier-La Janisse's House of Psychotic Women, but couldn't find any reference to either 'Identikit' nor 'The Driver's Seat' in the index -- only Secret Ceremony was cited in reference to Elizabeth Taylor (apparently Severin's House of Psychotic Women collection, an unusual DVD box set based on the book, features Identikit).

 

Last October, I finally watched Identikit, about “a flamboyantly dressed Englishwoman cutting a swath through Italy - tourism as exhibitionism, self-destruction as self-actualization.”  I believe it was due to Janisse's efforts that Identikit has been made available on various streaming services, like Prime and Shudder (I streamed it on Tubi). Still not sure whether I actually liked this unsettling film, but I certainly appreciated it as an unusual oddity, with its garish 70's Italo-trash aesthetics and Liz Taylor’s unhinged performance. 

 

The premise of Identikit reminded me very much of Martin Amis' London Fields, which I’d read many years ago and was intrigued by its morbid subject matter, mostly because I was a teenager and I'd never read anything like it before. I realize now that Amis was likely influenced by The Driver's Seat when he wrote London Fields:  both Lise and Nicola Six are ‘murderees’ by their own design.  As a reader also observed: Amis tends to get excoriated for his creation of Six, as if she’s the creation of a misogynist. Yet is she really that different a creation from Lise?  

 

After having watched Identikit, I wanted to get my hands on Muriel Spark's novella.

 

While reading the book, much of the mystery surrounding Lise’s motives was gone having already watched the film adaptation, which was incredibly faithful to The Driver’s Seat.  However, the book did provide a tiny clue into her erratic and unconventional behaviour (that seemed to be missing in the film):

Her lips are slightly parted: she, whose lips are usually pressed together with the daily disapprovals of the accountants’ office where she has worked continually, except for the months of illness, since she was 18, that is to say, for 16 years and some months. Her lips, when she does not speak or eat, are normally pressed together like the ruled line of a balance sheet, marked straight with her old-fashioned lipstick, a final and judging mouth, a precision instrument.

Lise seemed to have undergone some kind of long-term health issue and her death-wish may be due to the fact that she had some form of terminal illness, which she hadn't divulged to anyone.

A Letterboxd reviewer for Identikit took the words out of my mouth:

I was struck by how incredibly faithful the film is to the source, even adhering closely to the clever way the book plays with time. Giuseppe Patroni Griffi's images support the text wonderfully right from the opening shots of nude mannequins with heads covered in shiny reflecting foil. There is a constant motif of bright backlighting as well, reflecting the harsh personality of Lise, forcing your eyes to adjust and create definition. All lovely ways of reinforcing a story that centers around the concept of identity, and how we form and control the way we are perceived.

Much like Identikit, I wasn't sure whether I liked The Driver's Seat, but I certainly appreciated its oddness, its unsettling-ness, its frankness, as well as its leanness, much like this reader: 

 I decided to reread a book that is one of her shortest, most memorable and certainly starkest…  The Driver’s Seat (1970) is 101 pages long (in the irksome style of technology manufacturers who describe their products as “7.2mm thin”, I suppose I should say it’s 101 pages short). That is important because first, it shows that Spark has no interest in padding out her story – it is not one of those novels that is really an abruptly promoted novella – and second, because it means the story has almost no middle. It’s lean and hungry. There are many books whose beginnings or endings are praised, but how often do we say, The middle of that book? I couldn’t get enough of it. When you see a book without a middle – Patrick McGrath’s Dr Haggard’s Disease also comes to mind – it’s likely that rather than having only a beginning and an end, what has really happened is that the author has followed Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to “start as close to the end as possible.”

The Driver's Seat,was very much a dark, existential journey (physical and psychological) of a woman who lived a conventional life who comes to realize she doesn't have much to lose, and is looking for a way to end her life in her own terms, yet is still limited in agency due to 20th c. (patriarchal) society.  It was even shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1970.  I would definitely read more Muriel Spark, if I come across her other books.

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. Our Lady of Mile End

By Sarah Gilbert 

I'd first heard of Our Lady of Mile End via FB -- by seeing a friend flag that she was going to attend the book launch event at the D&Q bookstore.  I learned later she was actually good friends with author Sarah Gilbert, not to mention she'd also highly recommended that I read the book.  So when I was at D&Q to do some Christmas shopping, I decided to purchase a copy so as to support a local writer and fellow neighbour, even though I didn't know her personally.  I’ve lived in the Mile End for about 15 years while Gilbert has lived here since she was a university student in the 1990s. 

A bit of background about the author:

 

Gilbert started writing about Mile End while on maternity leave in 2008.  “I took a lot of walks with my daughter, and often I was pushing the stroller very slowly to get her to sleep,” she explains. “I got to observe my surroundings in detail.”

The immediate result was Mile Endings, a blog that recorded the people and places affected — for better or for worse — by the neighbourhood’s ongoing gentrification. It found an enthusiastic audience.

 

So it made sense for Gilbert to eventually segue into short stories about the neighbourhood she loves, and the collection became Our Lady of Mile End.  Already loving the cover illustration – Mile End residents "airing out their laundry" on multiple clothes lines strung between the neighbourhood's signature triplex buildings -- I was very much looking forward to reading the collection, assuming the stories would cover a various cross-section of intersecting lives of my fellow residents.

 

First up was “Material”, about a young artist, Alice, who cleans apartments in the Mile End for a living.  The story begins with Alice taking a shower at her client’s place.  Since she lives at her warehouse studio along with other artists, and it’s located in an industrial zone, the building isn’t fitted with kitchens and showers, and the Y was closed due to renovations.   In any case, Alice’s client comes home unexpectedly, surprised to see that Alice had used her shower.  Ok, so far an interesting situation that reflects the gentrification of the Mile End, which not that long ago, used to be very affordable for artists and musicians, but rising rents forced many move to cheaper areas.  Interestingly, Alice is a textile artist who likes to collect castoffs from her clients, namely the lint that collects in the dryer, to use in her artwork.  However, before anything of substance could take root in “Material”, the story was over after a few pages.  

 

The next story was “What If”, about a woman named Meg who left the back door ajar while WFH alone inside her apartment.  When she goes into the kitchen, she finds a strange man peering into her refrigerator.  He had splotches of blue pain all over his shirt and acted rather nonchalant about his appearance.   Since her bf was involved in theatre, for some bizarre reason, Meg assumed that Jason sent a friend over to perform some kind of prank on her, because why would a robber act like he’s just dropping by her place?  Later, after talking to her friend, Meg learned a bank heist had occurred in the area and one of the robbers fled the scene while the police went in search for him.  Meg realized that the man who was in her kitchen and used her bathroom was probably the bank robber!

 

This made me recall a fairly exciting news story some years ago about an armed bank robbery attempt which involved a police car chase, then the car crashed, a male suspect fled the scene and was still at large in the Mile End.  The police had cordoned off the entire area as they scoured the alleys and yards in search of the fugitive.  This happened back in 2016, but Gilbert re-situated the event six months before the pandemic, a time when no once visited people’s homes anymore.  “There was no possibility of strangers, no surprise encounters.”

 

Long after the blue paint-splotched man left her home without incident, and Meg realized she was put in a potentially dangerous situation, she got turned on as she recalled her chance encounter, hence the title “What If.”   This made me groan inside (not in a good way), and made me wonder whether Gilbert had this very same "what if" fantasy, ie. “what if a fugitive bank robber ended up hiding in my apartment?”  I didn't want to read about the author's sex fantasy, FFS!  Gimme some stories about people's real lives!!

 

By this point, I was getting a little wary.  I don’t read short stories often, but I know they can be wispy vignettes and fleeting sketches of life, yet taken together as a whole, they could form an over-arching idea, held together by common themes, etc.  This was kind of what I was hoping for in Our Lady of Mile End.  But after reading a story, it would leave me feeling unsatisfied, like consuming bland consommé for lunch instead of something more filling.  

 

There was one recurring character who appeared in several stories. Evelyn the English college professor first appeared in an early story “Introduction to College English” in which she gets into a conflict with a student named Maya.  The story delves into each person’s POV of the other, and ends up with Evelyn writing a nice reference letter for Maya.  

 

In “The Visit”, Evelyn is at her Mile End apartment when she gets a phone call from her brother Dominiq who had just arrived at the airport for a spontaneous visit.  She convinces him to meet her at her chalet in the Laurentians, so most of the story is about her and her brother having fairly mundane conversations about their lives.  At the end of the story, we find out that this visit as fabricated and all in Evelyn’s head as her brother never made it out to see her.  In reality, he had been diagnosed with late stage cancer and died a few weeks later.  Not only was the story barely had anything to do with the Mile End, it was a wish fulfillment fantasy.  The story ended with a “—for Bart” so it seemed to have personal relevance for Gilbert, at least.  And Evelyn Wilson seems to be a kind of cipher for the author as they are both English professors who live in the Mile End?

 

Another lacklustre story was “Green Eyes”, about a young woman named Amber somewhere four hours north of Montreal trying to hack tree-planting.  I couldn’t remember if her character had appeared in an earlier story, but this was yet another story that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the Mile End except for one paragraph:

     The Park Avenue grocery store where she’d worked for two university summers would be busy by now, with lines of shoppers snaking up to her cash… There had to be more to work than being a human robot. 

     She got the tree planting idea from a friend of a friend who was selling his bags and shovel.

Why couldn't the story be about her experience working at the checkout line instead? Personally, I wasn’t all that interested in reading about Amber tree-planting in some remote area of Quebec, even if she happened to work at the PA Supermarket.  I felt cheated somehow!

 

“Catch” was the final story in the collection based on a rather sensational incident of an attempted kidnapping of a teenage girl in adjacent Outremont.  Again, I remembered the news coverage of the incident and fortunately, the girl was able to escape unscathed.  Gilbert’s story used all the major facts from the incident:

“The girl, who is a minor and whose name is protected by a publication ban, was walking to her friend’s house Friday afternoon when a motorist pulled up beside her at St-Viateur and Durocher Sts.

The man identified himself as a police officer and said he had to arrest her because she was a suspect in a drug deal. She was handcuffed, placed in the back of the car and blindfolded, she told the police.

After screaming for several minutes while the man was driving, she managed to open the door and fall out onto the street.

A witness took a photo of the suspect’s licence plate as he sped off. Police arrested the suspect about an hour later on Montreal’s north shore…”

 

In Gilbert’s story, there were also a few witnesses, with the focus on a busybody woman named Irene, who kind of took charge of the situation.  She spoke to the police and seeing that the girl was in shock, and recognizing a nun who was living at the nearby Carmelite convent, she got an idea.  Irene approached the nun and asked if the convent would be willing to harbor the traumatised teenager until a family member arrived.  I think this is where Our Lady of Mile End gets its title from.

 

It’s clear that Gilbert drew some of her inspiration from local news articles over the years and tried to weave them into her stories.  The author didn’t seem to have any real connection to the kidnapped girl.  Nor did she seem to know anyone who may have had a run-in with the “sexy” bank robber.  I was left disappointed that Gilbert didn’t draw inspiration from actual locals, who either lived or worked in the Mile End.  What were their stories, I wondered?  I’m sure former bookseller SW Welch had many interesting stories about his colourful customers.  Pretty much all the characters Gilbert’s stories were white, Anglo, with similar socio-economic backgrounds.  Gilbert definitely followed the adage of writing what she knows.  With what she didn’t know, she got from news stories of bank heists and attempted kidnappings.  So rather than stories about actual insiders, it felt more like they were written by someone looking from the outside in, which is not so different from her early blog observations.

 

A good example is the third last story, “The Word”, which once again features Gilbert’s alter ego, Evelyn Wilson (Gilbert taught literature at Dawson College).  This time, Evelyn is trying to conduct a post-pandemic zoom class with her students.  She decided to read aloud a poem that had the n-word in it, thus promptly losing control of her class as it deteriorates into arguments about whether saying the n-word is racist or not.  Part of the story is also told from the POV of the student as the n-word was overheard by his younger brother and his mom, as they live in a small apartment.  The student and his family aren’t white, but their racial background isn’t specified.  This was the only story that featured people who weren’t white.

 

The student observes Evelyn as she vainly tries to defend herself:  “I read the words in the poem so we could examine the context in which Shire uses the n-word and see her specific purpose for doing so.  To clarify, I was not, I am not, using the n-word myself.”

 

In any case, the class was a failure, and a few days later, Evelyn runs into this student, who was visiting the area with a friend (he doesn’t live in ‘affluent’ Mile End).   The story makes it clear that Evelyn, despite being gray and frumpy, lives a privileged life (we should note that she also has a chalet in the Laurentians, as noted in “The Visit”.) and strongly hints that Evelyn has some thinking to do.  

Gilbert once again, probably got the idea for “The Word” as the use of the n-word in academic settings has been a hot button issue in recent years about whether freedom of expression can trump the freedom of being othered felt by various minority groups.  There have been media coverage of teacher and professors in Quebec and Ottawa being cancelled because they dared utter the n-word in front of students.

 

Again, like many of the stories, the theme was only lightly dealt with as the stories are limited in length.  I very much wanted to like OLoME, and at first it really looked like something I could relate to.  But most of the stories were unsatisfying or rather meh.  The Montreal Guardian described the collection as “warm-hearted and well-meant” which to me, is code for “safe literature”.  If I was a writer, I'd hate it if a critic described my fiction as "well-meant"!  I don’t mind if the stories are about ordinary people, like myself, but the content of the stories felt limited in scope and somewhat solipsistic in that it didn’t capture a diverse cross-section of the Mile End.  In hindsight, I should’ve just borrowed the book from the library instead of spending $20 on it!

22. Beautiful Darkness

By Fabien Vehlmann & Kerascoët. Translated from the French by Helge Dascher.

Drawn & Quarterly had a Black Friday sale of their books (the second book was half off).  I found two graphic novels: Are You Willing to Die for the Cause? Revolution in 1960s Quebec and Beautiful Darkness, with the intention of respectively giving them to Olman and my daughter for Christmas. 

 

Beautiful Darkness seemed like it'd be suitable for older kids.  The illustrations were so beautiful and dreamy.  I should have read through it first, but even so, I think my 11 yo daughter would’ve been able to handle the content.  For Christmas, she had requested new clothes for the first time and not a single toy (except for Nintendo games, obvs), so this book was one of the few non-clothing items I got her. 

 

She began reading it shortly after Christmas and at some point, reproached me with something to the effect of, “Mommy, I can’t believe you got this book for me!  It’s so disturbing!”    

It turned out that the main fairy girl ends up gouging the eyes out of a mouse!  She told me that she wasn't going to read any more and handed the book back to me!

Well, I admit I felt a bit bad for not pre-reading Beautiful Darkness before giving it to the kid.  When I flipped through it, I say pages like the one to the right 👉.  I did feel she was old enough to handle some unexpected violence portrayed in comics (as long as it’s not gratuitous nor sexual), but I understand that animal cruelty is hard to stomach.   

Earlier this month, I had taken my daughter to see Ellisapie live in concert and the venue (Usine C) was located in a dodgy area of downtown Montreal.  It was sketchy enough that, as we were leaving, my husband cautioned us to stay alert.  Even though we both believe in exposing our kid to the rougher parts of the city, we won't hesitate to exercise  precautions in case of the unexpected.

 

When the concert ended around 10pm, we walked back to the metro station on Ste-Catherine East.  There was an ambulance parked by the entrance and as we approached the stairs, an old homeless-looking man was being carried away in a gurney by EMTs, his head wrapped in several layers of white gauze with a visible bloody spot seeping through the bandages.  As we passed them going down the other side of the stairs, we encountered the bright pool of blood where he fell on the muddy steps.  We didn’t stop to gawk, though we may have slowed a little to take in the unexpected scene.  When we reached the bottom, I saw that my daughter looked a little stunned, and I asked if she was ok.  She nodded and I reassured her that the man was getting the help he needed and that he should be ok.  That was the most exciting incident during our one night in the downtown east side!

 

So yeah, even though it wasn’t great that my daughter encountered some violence in a graphic fairy tale, I knew she wasn’t going to be too traumatized by it!

 

                                                                   When I finally read Beautiful Darkness myself, I was absolutely entranced by this wonderfully subversive fairy tale and the dark, horrifying evil lurking beneath the gorgeously illustrated surface.  The aesthetics and content was right in my wheelhouse!  Beautiful Darkness has been described as "Thumbelina meets Lord of the Flies" and an anti-fairy tale.  Somehow I missed this when I initially flipped through the pages, but in the prologue, there were little people having tea inside the decomposing body of a young girl deep in the forest.  Setting a very creepy tone, it did.

 

I recently rewatched The Mist (2007) and thought how very similar it was to Beautiful Darkness (2009). Both Zelie and Mrs Carmody embodied the narcissistic psychopath who preys on the weaknesses of their followers and delights in inflicting pain upon the innocent.  Zelie’s unchecked bullying finally sent the sweet and trusting Aurora into a terrifying rage and her dear mouse friend suffered because he had betrayed her.  This was the horrible act of violence that upset my daughter so much.  

 

Like The Mist, Beautiful Darkness made me question, who are the real monsters?  Are they the strange beasts outside our door, or have they always been lurking inside every one of us, needing only a trigger or two to unleash the beast within?  What is more horrifying?  The faceless man who may have murdered the young girl?  Or Zelie, the beautiful yet sadistic fairy who plucks butterfly wings for her dress and buries misfits alive for fun?  Or the followers, who represent the moral abyss devoid of empathy and reasoning?  Perhaps the real tragedy is Aurora, who once radiated light and hope, has now finally succumbed to the darkness.

 

 

      

21. A Visit

By Shirley Jackson

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

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

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

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

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

20. Persuasion

By Jane Austen

19. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

By Kate Beaton

18. Women Talking

By Miriam Toews

Women Talking was one of a few random finds from my annual summer visit to Vancouver.

 

My brother moved to Abbotsford a few years ago, a minimum one-hour drive from Kits, so I was trying to find a way to visit him.  In the past, we’ve met up for lunch in Surrey, a good halfway point.  I recall my friend had recommended the Otter Co-op Outdoor Experience, a water park out in Aldergrove, a half hour drive from Abbotsford.

 

I thought my family could spend an afternoon at the water park, then meet my brother for dinner.  Admission was ridiculously inexpensive, like $10 for an adult and $5 for kids but the catch was you had to buy tickets online at least a day in advance, and we were limited to a 3 hour time slot.  Otter was a decent water park with slides that you ride down on inflatable tubes, a wave pool, hot tubs and swimming pools.  It was quite crowded too – no surprise, considering the low admission price.

 

When our time ended, we had about an hour to kill before meeting my brother.  There was a Salvation Army thrift store nearby where we browsed around.  It was there that I spotted a hardcover of Miriam Toews' Women Talking - a pristine library copy that still had labels stuck to it and the plastic cover, but had never been checked out.  It was only 25 cents!

 

What made this copy particularly interesting was that it once belonged to the “Middle and High Library of the Langley Christian School”.  I thought, how interesting that a Christian school would acquire Women Talking, as it deals with the very adult subject of sexual assault within a remote religious community!  I wonder if someone had caught on and removed the book so it wouldn't outrage young Christian minds... how else would this apparently unread copy end up at a thrift store?

 

I’d already watched the film adaptation (on Aug 30th to be precise, thanks to my Letterboxd history).  I was spurred on because some filmmaking friends of filmmaking friends were saying how good it was.  I was invited to join a 5a7 at Pelican’s astro-turfed terrasse.  The FFs of FFs shared an amusing story about attending the premiere (I assume in Montreal) where a couple was being very vocal about how much they disliked the film.  I think they were parents of Dave G?  I can’t remember.  At some point we clinked glasses.  Someone made a toast, to ‘Women Talking’.  Then as our glasses clinked, I exclaimed, “To parents talking!”  I got a few laughs! 

 

As mentioned earlier, Women Talking was based on true occurrences of systemic rape within a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia.  Between 2005 and 2009, over a hundred girls and women in the colony woke up to discover that they had been drugged and sexually assaulted in their sleep.

 

The novel begins after the suspects had been finally caught and apprehended by city police -- eight men from within the Molotschna colony (the fictional name for the actual Manitoba colony).  While the rest of the village men were away to post bail for the suspects, the women secretly formed an ad hoc meeting in the barn loft to discuss whether they should stay or leave the colony.  They only had a couple of days to decide before the men returned with the suspects to await trial. 

 

Most of the novel was structured as the minutes of their meeting, which were taken by August Epp, the colony's male schoolteacher who recently returned following a period of excommunication. August took the minutes at the request of Ona, the object of his unrequited love and his childhood friend, as the women cannot read or write (they speak Plautdietsch).  Some may take issue with the fact that the story was told from the viewpoint of a man, but August was also an outsider and considered by the men to be low status like the women, as he cannot farm. 

 

Here's an excerpt from August’s POV which pretty much set up the story:

When I arrived in the spring of 2008, there were only whispers, fragments of whispers, concerning the mysterious night-time disturbances. Cornelius, one of my students, wrote a poem called “The Washline” in which he described the sheets and garments on his mother’s washline as having voices, of speaking with one another, of sending messages to other garments on other washlines. He read the poem to the class and all the boys laughed. The houses are so far apart and there is no electrical light anywhere, inside or out. The houses are small tombs at night…

 

      In the year after I arrived, the women described dreams they’d been having, and then eventually, as the pieces fell into place, they came to understand that they were collectively dreaming one dream, and that it wasn’t a dream at all.

 

      The women in the Friesen and the Loewen families who have gathered for today’s meeting represent three generations each, and all have been repeat victims in the attacks. I’ve done some simple calculations. Between 2005 and 2009, more than three hundred girls and women of Molotschna were made unconscious and attacked in their own beds. On average, an attack occurred every three or four days.

 

      Finally, Leisl Neustadter forced herself to stay awake night after night until she caught a young man prying open her bedroom window, holding a jug of belladonna spray in one hand. Leisl and her adult daughter wrestled the man to the ground and tied him up with baler twine. Later that morning, Peters was brought to the house to confront this young man, Gerhard Schellenberg, and Gerhard named the other seven men involved in the attacks.

      Nearly every female member of the Molotschna Colony has been violated by this group of eight, but most (except for the girls too young to understand these proceedings, and the women, led by Scarface Janz, who have already chosen to exercise the Do Nothing option) have marked an X next to their name to indicate that they are content (and many ecstatic) not to attend the meetings about how to respond. Instead, they will contribute to the well-being of the colony by tending to the chores, which are manifold now while the men are away, and which if abandoned for as little as one day will result in mayhem, especially when it comes to the milking and feeding of the animals.

Having read the book after watching the film, I thought Sara Polley and cast did a great job bringing the book to life.  I thought how articulately the women spoke in the film, for Mennonite women weren’t very literate, let alone educated.  But I also noted how much the screenplay was heavily based on the dialogue written by author Toews.  There was so much talking in the novel that I suspect Toews didn't bother with the use of quotation marks!

Here's a sample of one of their many discussions/arguments:

Salome, more calm now, adds: So once again, we return to our three reasons for leaving, and they are valid. We want our children to be safe. We want to keep our faith. And we want to think.

  Agata splays her fingers on the plywood table as if to build a new foundation. Shall we move on? she asks.

  But, says Mariche, if there is any chance that the men in prison are innocent shouldn’t we, as members of Molotschna, be joining forces to secure their freedom?

  Salome explodes. We’re not members of Molotschna!

  The other women recoil and even the sun takes shelter behind a cloud.

  Greta, she says, are your beloved Ruth and Cheryl members of Molotschna?

  No, not members, says Greta, although—

  Salome interrupts. We’re not members! she repeats. We are the women of Molotschna. The entire colony of Molotschna is built on the foundation of patriarchy (translator’s note: Salome didn’t use the word “patriarchy”—I inserted it in the place of Salome’s curse, of mysterious origin, loosely translated as “talking through the flowers”), where the women live out their days as mute, submissive and obedient servants. Animals. Fourteen-year-old boys are expected to give us orders, to determine our fates, to vote on our excommunications, to speak at the burials of our own babies while we remain silent, to interpret the Bible for us, to lead us in worship, to punish us! We are not members, Mariche, we are commodities. (Again, a translator’s note about the word “commodities”: similar situation to above.)

  Salome continues: When our men have used us up so that we look sixty when we’re thirty and our wombs have literally dropped out of our bodies onto our spotless kitchen floors, finished, they turn to our daughters. And if they could sell us all at auction afterwards they would.

Narratively speaking, having articulate characters is convenient because if the women were not very articulate, it would be harder for the author to convey good quality prose.  I found the writing to be overly expository at times and it often felt like Toews was using the women as mouthpieces to get her points across re: patriarchal oppression.  Thus, the writing came across very heavy-handed at times.

 

However, much of the thoughtful, articulate dialogue was attributed to Ona, especially when confronted by an angry Salome (who attacked the perpetrators with a scythe to avenge her children) or a defiant Mariche (who’s in denial that she’s in an abusive marriage).

 

Ona was a bit of an outsider due to some unconventional personality traits (intelligence, melancholy).  Even though she was illiterate and uneducated like the other women, she was able to use big words like “pernicious ideology” in her discussions to try to explain why men are the way they are.

Ona’s Narfa (a term for depression), the colonists say, had been latent, simmering but not unmanageable, until her father died. Afterwards, she committed her life to dreamy eccentricity, and also to facts, curiously, and to her seemingly preferred status as a pariah, as the devil’s daughter, and God-given burden to the colony. I contend a lighter, less intrusive presence has never been known.)

Despite the need to suspend a great deal of disbelief, Toews did execute a great premise:  have a sensitive male outsider take minutes of a secret meeting of women who are divided between leaving an oppressive Mennonite colony to start anew, or staying and thus, being stuck in a situation that won't change for the better.  The women, despite being uneducated and illiterate, are smart, articulate and funny.  After much discussion, which takes up the bulk of the novel, they finally agree upon a decision.

End spoiler coming...   

 

When August is alone with Ona:

   I asked her what good the minutes would do her and the other women if they were unable to read them? (But she may well have asked me instead, What good is it to be alive if you are not in the world?)

  And that’s when she told me the story of the squirrel and the rabbit and of their secret playing, and said that perhaps she hadn’t been meant to see them playing—yet she had seen them. Maybe there was no reason for the women to have minutes they couldn’t read. The purpose, all along, was for me to take them.

  The purpose was for me to take them, the minutes. Life.

  I smile. I see the world turning in on itself, like waves, but without a sea or shore to contain them. There was no point to the minutes. I have to laugh.

Well, there was a point.  The author needed to find a way to tell the story!  

 

So yes, the style and format was rather self-conscious, yet Women Talking was very well-written overall. The minutes device was really an excellent way of telling this important story by giving a POV from someone within the community yet outside of it, while still being empathetic to the victims.  Still, the writing was often too affected for me to truly enjoy it as a whole, as it reminded me too much of a staged play. Come to think of it, Women Talking would be perfect for the theatre stage!