Kel Bachus

Meh.

Revisado: 08-06-23

I agree with several previous reviewers. I was intrigued in the beginning and then just hated everyone in the story.

It suffered from the classically awful plot device of the "Mary Sue/Madonna" (Mia), who could do no wrong. (Despite being brilliantly obsessive about her art, she is somehow a perfect mother (and mother figure). Despite having never having developed closeness with anyone in her adult life, she is somehow still able to assess and provide the exact emotional needs of everyone who comes near her. And, despite having perpetrated a cruel and criminal act, and despite its coming to light she suffers no consequences, has no personal reckoning, and the reader is left to believe that this is a good thing. The people she wronged are never revisited to see their pain or progress. In fact, there is the implication that they may get word that someone know something via their lawyer and they will be forced to face it all again, but we'll never know, because the author only sees them as real people so far as it serves Mia's story after which point they are ignored much as Mia ignores their personhood. (In a way I might add, that is anathema to how the reader is bullied into believing Mia treats everyone she meets.)

Additionally, and far more sloppy is the terrible plot device that so many of the small issues that drive the story are caused by people not noticing or not talking to the people they are close to. These are exactly the sorts of things siblings who spend every day after school handing out and not just watching tv, but interacting and discussing would notice and bring up. Adjunct to this are a couple of glaring instances where, in service to pushing the plot in a certain direction, characters' actions are in direct opposition to the people they are otherwise shown to be.

I could keep going, but I think I've made my point. I am baffled by how this book has become as popular as it has and wish it had been worthy of the hours spent listening to it.

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marvelously engaging

Revisado: 04-27-23

I loved this audio drama. I was captivated and transported by the characters the actors and the story.

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Gothic horror, with all the attendant issues.

Revisado: 01-04-23

A lot of people say they like Dracula and Frankenstein and that’s because they haven’t read either Stoker or Shelley’s novels. Gothic horror is slow, ponderously slow and its characters wander around wide-eyed, perpetually startled and wringing their hands while failing to catch any sort of clue about what’s going on.

Have you read Poe? These are not action heroes.

The problem is that we don’t expect or really even want that kind of fiction anymore, and what Straub has done here — a lovely homage in some ways — isn’t going to resonate with a lot of readers. In modern fiction we’re looking for real tension, real gore, and characters we generally like and identify with. We look for the hero’s journey in most horror novels.

Ghost Story has very little of that.

Part of the problem is that books like Frankenstein were meant to be commentaries, allegories. This is about Promethean themes.

Straub does actually have a thesis, a parable here but it gets shoehorned in in the absolute last scene — humans are beautiful in their brevity (this is not new, out out brief candle and so on) — and that’s a shame. King’s strengths are in his characters and his themes. Straub creates a wonderful world here and it is — in its gothic, long-winded, overwrought way — a good yarn. But his characters are impotent ranging to whiny on to straight up unlikeable. When we finally meet a character we’re allowed to really feel and root for, in young Peter Barnes, he winds up mostly hero worshiping the other characters and does very little, or sweeps through full on Mary Sue.

Worst of all, no one transforms, or is changed or affected in a way we feel at all, and this is where Straub falls short of some of the gothic greats.

But it’s the book’s own morality that bothered me most, as it has other reviewers here. It is deeply sexist, where murder of a young woman by a group of men is justified by her — I kid you not — making them sexually uncomfortable. These men are then the protagonists and she is — well, a monster.

Just a mite problematic.

As others have observed, women are in this novel to be seen and not heard. Unless they are the objects of desire. And professors are allowed to sleep with graduate students. Because surely that’s okay. (Spoiler: it’s not.)

But worst of all is the racism, in the form of the minstrel (!!!!) Dr. Rabbitfoot.

Who (spoilers) is ritually murdered as the manifestation of ultimate evil as he repeatedly calls the protagonist (?) a “cracker.”

Yikes.

Straub’s gothic sentiment here, the pace and feel and prose and low key hysteria, is reminiscent of things like the sleeper novel Lady in White (an actually good and surprisingly readable gothic of that time), and as intended I think work pretty well.

But what is dated is BADLY dated.

Without characters I care about or a theme I can get behind (other than it’s okay to kill a woman if she shows you her scary lady parts) the whole thing left me really… well, cold.

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