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.

 

3. The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein

By Kiersten White

A few Goodread reviews mentioned how it was recommended to have some knowledge of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein (2018) has many nods to the original source material. Here's one review: 

“The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein is, essentially, a retelling of Frankenstein from the perspective of Elizabeth - an orphan taken in by the Frankenstein family and later the fiancée of Victor. I think this book will work much better for those familiar with the original as it gives a lot of nods to the story. It's hard to appreciate some of the clever twists the author takes without knowing what it's based on.

 

Through her eyes, the tortured genius of Victor becomes a sometimes frightening thing, and yet nothing is as terrifying as being a woman in 18th Century Europe. The stifling constraints placed on women and their ambitions are palpable as the story unfolds. It was so easy for a woman to be dismissed as whiny or silly, or worse-- mad.

When Victor goes missing in Ingolstadt and writes no letters, Elizabeth begins to track him down. Her investigation leads her down dark paths to charnel houses and secret laboratories. What has Victor been up to? Knowing the truth didn't take anything away from reading. In fact, it made those mysterious dark shadows all the creepier.

This story largely fills in gaps in the original tale, while shedding a completely new light on it. It's smart how Kiersten White has managed to keep a lot the same, while also creating a bigger and very different-looking picture.

The original Frankenstein calls into question what it really means to be a monster and, indeed, who the real monsters are. I think White might have answered that question.”

 

I had read Shelley’s Frankenstein when I was in my late teens/early twenties, and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to revisit the classic 1818 novel, so like the lazy, yet resourcefully efficient, reader that I am, I borrowed the graphic novel version to quicky refresh my memory instead! 

 

According to Wikipedia, Elizabeth Lavenza and Victor Frankenstein were first cousins in the original edition.  In the revised third edition (1831), Elizabeth was a non-relation adopted by the Frankenstein family.  According to the graphic novel, Elizabeth was portrayed as a saint, a self-sacrificing two-dimensional young woman who was loved by the Frankenstein family.  In The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein, she is naturally given much more depth as the Frankenstein narrative is retold entirely from her perspective, and there is a LOT more going on behind her innocent façade.  In fact, she’s a calculating survivor who’s determined to marry Victor, not because of love, but because it was her best option as an orphaned young woman in the 19^th century.

 

I’m going to rely on another Goodreads review to summarize how I felt, as it really does save me a lot of time, and time is precious right now!

“I do not think I expected one of the best books I read this year to be a retelling of Frankenstein where it’s not just about the nature of monstrousness, but about the power of women working together and escaping an abusive relationship, with intoxicating writing and a morally grey lady as the protagonist.

 

I absolutely loved the way Kiersten White wrote the abusive relationship at the heart of this - we see the fucked-up nature of that relationship long before Elizabeth does, but it never feels as if Elizabeth “should’ve known better.” In every moment, she has full audience sympathy - in every moment, even if I hated her actions, I understood her. The narrative puts you so far into her mind that it is impossible to look away and it is glorious.

I think the focus on agency within a narrative should be clear, but I really do want to say - this is why retellings are my favorite. Taking a book that is about the essential nature of humanity from the perspective of a man and flipping its themes solidly is something I will always be in full support of - the meta-textuality of the narrative is absolutely brilliant. And it’s not just about one woman - it’s about the relationships between women and the strength found in them. Mary, Justine, and Elizabeth form such fantastic relationships, and each feels so fully-formed in a way they may not have in the original narrative.”

I will add that, although there were plenty of hints revealing what a narcissistic psychopath Victor was, the twist did take me a little by surprise, and I loved that.  I think part of it was due to re-reading the graphic novel that was based on the original novel.  I kept expecting Frankenstein the monster to kill Elizabeth, and I kept thinking that the monster was also responsible for the deaths of Victor’s little brother William and of the servant Justine, but that was not the case at all.   I think if I hadn't read the graphic novel, I might've clued in sooner, but that's fine, I think I preferred being taken by surprise.

 

Kiersten White did an excellent job setting up the plot twist, and not only that, the denouement was really quite exciting and satisfying.  Mary, the daughter of the book shop owner in Ingolstadt, also has a pivotal role in the denouement, and I’m sure her name is a nod to Shelly.  To be sure, The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein was one of my favourite reads of the year so far.  Highly recommended!

 

p.s. This is yet another winner/recommendation from Monster, She Wrote ! 

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. 

 

1. When Darkness Loves Us

By Elizabeth Engstrom

I first heard of Elizabeth Engstrom in Monster, She Wrote where she was featured in a chapter titled “Monstrosity in the Mundane".

 

Her bio is interesting. Born Betsy Lynn Gutzmer, Engstrom didn’t start writing seriously until well into her thirties when she signed up for a writing workshop in Hawaii. She had lived a full life – she acquired a Masters degree in applied theology and had her own advertising agency, which she sold to embark on a career in fiction writing.  She was also a wife and mother.

 

I was happy to find a new copy of When Darkness Loves Us when I ordered via Abes Books and didn’t really clue into the fact that it was a special reissue when Olman saw me reading it and asked, is that a Paperbacks from Hell?  Turns out When Darkness Loves Us was featured in Grady Hendrix’s book, Paperbacks from Hell.  Looks like Hendrix has given some forgotten or out of print horror books a second life.

 

The reissue even features the cover art by Jill Bauman that graced the cover of the original 1986 Tor paperback.  After finishing the book, I realize how fitting the illustration was -- an old-fashioned doll with a cracked face and a gaping hole where the nose had been broken off.

 

I found it interesting that in Monster, She Wrote, Kröger and Anderson omitted the fact that before Engstrom became a wife, mother and writer, she was a recovered alcoholic.  In Hendrix’s intro, he simply stated that for ten years, Gutzmer was a drunk.  How Engstrom described her past life gave some interesting insight into the kind of stories she wrote:

“I hung with the underbelly of society”, she says. “And the worse they were, they better I felt about myself. I had friends in really low places, and they were the people I was comfortable with. No real identity, living in the shadows, only coming out at night.”

 

According to Hendrix, in Engstrom’s stories, monsters are created, not born.  Monsters also lurk among us and within us.

 

I really wanted to like When Darkness Loves Us.  It was one of the first stories she had developed when she attended Theodore Sturgeon’ workshop.  The premise was interesting, written like a dark fairy tale and barely the length of a novella, it's not more than sixty-odd pages long.  It begins with pregnant sixteen year old Sally Ann, lustfully admiring her young husband from afar while he’s driving a tractor out on their farm.  She decides to explore an abandoned tunnel and ends up being trapped underground for many years.

 

Sally Ann learns to survive in constant darkness, and gives birth to her son (his name is Clint!), who grows up in the cave without ever seeing daylight.  When he’s old enough to be on his own, Sally renews her desire to go to the top, even though her son tries to convince her to stay.  At this point, I stopped reading and tried to imagine where Engstrom was going to go with this.  I imagined Sally would somehow escape and be discovered by her family.  Her reunion with her husband would probably have unexpected consequences, but she would end up abandoning her son.  Even though Clint never wanted to leave the cave, he goes up top in search of his mother.  He becomes the monster in the cave who terrorizes Sally Ann and her family, but only during the night because the sunlight frightens him.

 

But the actual story is much darker and twisted.  The real horror is not being fully welcomed back by your own family because they thought you were dead and have moved on.  On top of that, you’ve become a shrunken twisted version of yourself with missing teeth and blackened lips.

 

I felt that the abrupt shift in POV to Sally’s son when he’s left alone in the darkness didn’t work for me.  Even though it was disturbing to read his innermost thoughts and actions, I felt that this shift was primarily done to shock the viewer with his dark fantasies.  I felt the story would have been stronger had it kept the focus on Sally Ann as it was her story.  Basically, Sally Ann soon learns that she had been gone for twenty years!  So her son wasn't a boy but a man!  Her less attractive sister ended up marrying her husband and they have children of her own.  Sally Ann ends up kidnapping her youngest niece and brings her back to the caves to introduce to her 20 year old son!  

 

The blurb at the back of the book was also terribly written and inaccurate:  Sally Ann and Martha. Two women, searching for love. Finding terror.

 

It made it seem that both Sally Ann and Martha are in the same story.  I thought that Beauty Is… was the name of a new chapter that would continue from When Darkness Loves Us because the last chapter did not have a proper ending.  When I realized it was an entirely different story, I had to re-adjust my expectations.

 

Compared to When Darkness Loves Us, Beauty Is… was 150 pages, more than double the length.

 

Beauty Is… wasn’t as creepy, but it was a good slow-burner and much more effective than When Darkness… I felt that the order should’ve been reversed.  Beauty Is… was the stronger and more developed story.  What they have in common is the rural setting.  Both protagonists grew up on the farm and are either innocent or naïve to the ways of the world before they become damaged by a traumatic event or circumstance.

 

In Beauty Is…, Martha is a middle-aged simpleton living alone in the farmhouse she grew up in.  She goes into town to get some supplies and in her interactions with the townsfolk, it seems that they all look out for her.  The chapters alternate between Martha and her mother Fern, who like Sally Ann, also married a farmer at a young age.  Shortly into her marriage, Fern discovered she has the gift of healing, when she saves the life of a neighbour who had a terrible accident.  Fern soon becomes revered and respected as the town healer, but Harry, her god-fearing husband is suspicious of her gifts, as he thinks that all this good fortune is going to come back and bite them.  Sure enough, their daughter Martha is born without a nose.  Fern loves her anyway but Harry is frightened and disgusted by the sight of his baby.  The real horror is not Martha’s deformity, but how she is treated by her small-minded, heartless father.  As the narrative unfolds, we learn that Martha was not always “simple”.  Something traumatic happened to Martha as a child when Fern had to help someone in an emergency and Martha was left alone with her father.

 

Once you figure out the theme of Beauty Is…, you can see some of the heavy-handedness of the storytelling.  It was still an interesting yet underwhelming read.  Personally, I found the author’s life more fascinating than her works of fiction.

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.

22. Frankenstein: The Graphic Novel

By Mary Shelley (Published 2009 by Classical Comics)

I plan to read The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein in the very near future and heard that author Kiersten White makes many references to Mary Shelley’s classic novel.  I had read Frankenstein ages ago, either in my teens or twenties, and didn’t want to re-read it again, so I had the brilliant idea of borrowing the graphic novel version from the library. 

 

I didn’t realize until I had finished it that there were two versions of the graphic novel:  Original Text and Quick Text.  Thankfully, I had read the version with the original, though still abridged, text.  Published in 2009, the graphic novel may be a little hard to find now.

 

I couldn’t relate to how incredibly stupid and self-centred Victor Frankenstein was.  I understand the major theme is about the folly of man, but still…

 

I suppose this mirrors life because in the real world, since time immemorial, or at least during humanity’s patriarchal history, there have been plenty of brilliant men who have made incredible innovations, but through some terrible weakness, ie. short-sightedness, greed, narcissism, etc. the invention had wrought more damage than good.  This is the core lesson of Frankenstein. 

It’s an epic tragedy.

 

In the source text, the character of Elizabeth Lanza is rather thinly drawn.  She loves Victor dearly, has a generous heart, and is self-sacrificing.  And she dies by the monster’s hands.  Apparently, the Elizabeth in Kiersten White’s retelling is not only a survivor, but is highly intelligent and calculating.   In a way, I’m glad I re-read the Frankenstein graphic novel as it not only heightened my enjoyment of The Dark Descent..., it was a factor in not seeing how the plot in White’s retelling would play out. 

21. Holes

By Louis Sachar

My daughter really enjoyed Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game and requested more mystery books for her birthday. I googled "best YA mystery books like The Westing Game" and Louis Sachar's Holes showed up as one of 'em.

The kid gulped down Holes (and The Tattooed Potato) not long after her birthday, learned in the afterword a movie adaptation exists and promptly informed her parents that we should all watch it as a family. Her bookish parents said, well, maybe we should read the book first... well, after trying to wait patiently for about a week, she pretty much demanded that we watch Holes for our movie night (double-billed with my choice for Gremlins 2 since Halloween was approaching).

I had never in my life heard of Holes the movie before, so I was a little wary until I saw some raving Letterboxd reviews. We were all pleasantly surprised at how good the movie was. I realize now the love for this movie comes from Millennials who grew up with Holes. For Gen X parents with a Gen Z kid, this made an excellent family movie.

I ended up reading Holes about a couple of weeks later, and I can now say the movie adaptation was surprisingly faithful to the novel.  It kept the non-linear structure where it jumped back in time to Stanley’s great-great-grandfather and back to current events and then back to the story of Kissin Kate Barlow and Sam the Onion Seller.  I was surprised that the Warden’s snake venom-tainted nail polish scene was in the book – it was so nasty how she scratched Mr Sir’s face with her painted nails!

I might as well write a quick summary:  Stanley lives in a big city and gets caught with a stolen pair of used shoes donated by a famous baseball player, only he didn't steal them.  He gets sent to a remote detention centre in the middle of nowhere that's overseen by the Warden, a wealthy woman whose family has owned the land for generations.  It's called Camp Green Lake because there used to be a lake over a century ago but it's now just parched barren desert.  The boys are all forced to dig one big hole each day to "build character" but there is a nefarious reason that only the Warden knows.  The land is perforated with hundreds and hundreds of five-foot wide and five-foot deep holes.  Stanley gradually gets used to the physical demands of the daily hole-digging and becomes one of the boys.  He makes friends with the very quiet Zero, a very bright but illiterate boy. We also learn that Stanley had a great-great-grandfather in Latvia who was cursed by a fortune teller before he immigrated to America because he broke a promise. When Stanley's great-great-grandfather was travelling from New York to Texas, he was robbed by Kiss Kate Barlow.  Ever since then, Stanley's family has always had bad luck.  Stanley's father is a struggling inventor obsessed with finding a cure for foot odor.  When Stanley finds a small object in one of his digs, this sets off a chain of events.  The reader gradually learns that there is a connection between Stanley's family history, the barren land at Camp Green Lake, the Warden, and the boy known as Zero.  Some adventure ensues, and everything gets explained at the end with a satisfying conclusion.

One main difference was that Clyde Livingston was a baseball player in the book, while in the movie, he was a basketball star (which actually makes more sense as basketball has become the more popular sport).  The ending was also slightly different.  In the movie, the storm scene was made more dramatic by having it rain down on all the characters at the Camp Green Lake compound.  In the book, the rain only started as Stanley and Zero/Hector were driving away from Camp Green Lake in the lawyer’s car.

The book was as enjoyable and fun as the movie.  There are many characters and a lot of stuff going on with the nonlinear plot that is fairly complex for a YA novel.  Sachar mentioned how it was important for him to make it digestible and appealing for a 10-11 year old, and he pretty much succeeds in tying up all the loose ends.  I can now understand why my daughter was so impatient to watch the movie after she finished the book.  I heard that Sigourney Weaver wanted to star in Holes the movie because her daughter was also a big fan.

Louis Sachar seems like a genuinely nice, personable guy.  I liked his notes at the end, when he mentioned how Holes was very popular at juvenile detention centers, and he’d received fan mail from the kids there.  He also admitted that he only learned that you can’t actually dig a hole 5 feet deep and 5 feet wide using a five-foot shovel until the movie was being made. There was no room for the actors to swing their shovels!

p.s. Also learned another piece of trivia while reading Letterboxed reviews of Holes: some people can't watch the movie due to a condition known as trypophobia: a fear of holes, or, "a strong aversion towards clusters of holes or patterns. While not officially recognized as a mental disorder, it's characterized by a range of negative physical and emotional responses, such as disgust, fear, and anxiety, when exposed to such imagery."

20. Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror & Speculative Fiction

By Lisa Kröger and Melanie Anderson

During the 2020 pandemic, Olman ordered a bunch of books from Argo because he wanted to support a local indie bookshop.
 
I think he had spotted Monster, She Wrote and thought it'd be right up my wheelhouse.  It took me a while to realize this, but it turned out he was right!   At first, I only read the chapters of authors I was already familiar with, ie. Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Sarah Waters, etc.  It was only later when I started reading the book from start to finish that I discovered a treasure trove of new authors.  This also explains why I finally finished it in 2024, as I would read a chapter in between my "regular" reading routine.
 
Even though Monster, She Wrote gives a general overview of sorts, it also pays tribute to the trailblazing women writers of horror and science fiction of the past four centuries starting with the Gothic fiction of Mary Cavendish and Mary Shelley to contemporary award-winners Helen Oyeyemi and Emily St. John Mandel.  Yet what makes this book special is that Kröger and Anderson also shine a light on more obscure and/or overlooked writers, like Ruby Jean Jensen, Elizabeth Engstrom and Kathe Koja.
 
The authors may be academics, but Monster, She Wrote is written in an easy, informal yet informational style with lots of pop-cultural references.  Each featured author is organized by subgenre, gets a brief life history, their better known works (with brief descriptions), recommended reads and a quote. I sat updating my 'to read' list as I went through each author, picking up almost several new books to check out!   
 
Monster, She Wrote is a keeper for sure.  I have my first wave of authors I want to read asap but there will definitely be a second wave as I delve into works by other featured writers.
 
p.s. I've already started checking off my list by:

•     borrowing the graphic novelThrough The Woods from the library
•     purchasing a reprint of Elizabeth Engstrom's When Darkness Loves Us
•     purchasing a reprint of Kathe Koja's The Cipher