S. Weiner

My favorite horror novel

Revisado: 01-20-25

I fell for this book, in all its multitudinous horrors, in college, 2 decades ago. I've read it in print, with and without scholarly annotations. I've read it with a class and on my own. I've read it and reread it and seen the film adaptations and while I always intended to get around to listening to the audiobook, it took me so long to do it.

I always imagined, I think, that the tricky part of the audiobook would be avoiding getting swept up in the romantic language when presented in Jeremy irons's dulcet tones. I was deeply mistaken. Somehow, having an adult man with a voice like velvet speaking Nabokov's words brought all the pain buried in the story right to the forefront. Every time he describes her tears, her protests, her rage, her youth, it's worse. As it should be. The book is a masterpiece, the narration no less so, but my god, a hard listen.

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Let down by the narration

Revisado: 12-13-23

This is an odd book. It's set in a nebulous past that's probably somewhere around the mid-1980s, a few years before it was written, but the main characters sometimes talk like they've just stepped out of the 1920s. And seem to dress like it's 1954. And the author's very strong accent does nothing to set the scene, since not a single one of her characters shares her Mississippi origins.

It did make me extremely nostalgic for my years in a tiny liberal arts college in the northeast US, surrounded by the smartest people I've ever known, but also some of the shallowest, most spoiled monsters, studying obscure subjects in old buildings. But I was still left with a kind of hollowness at the heart of this book. Maybe just because Richard is essentially a cipher. He's got occasional feelings, and I understand his one driving force--to reinvent himself not as a poor suburban Californian, but as a wealthy and cosmopolitan intellectual from basically anywhere else--but he's half-hearted even about that. He mostly does what anyone asks and goes where anyone tells him. Convenient for the narrative, but hard to care about him.

Tartt certainly is a craftsman, though. The book may have half a dozen places where it could've ended just fine, and long stretches where absolutely nothing happens, but her sentences carry us along beautifully.

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Unnecessary, but competent

Revisado: 12-13-23

The fundamental issue with this book is that it doesn't need to exist. It adds nothing to Shirley Jackson's text and looks worse than it is by comparison. As a haunted house novel, it's fine! it's fun and has some spooky things going on. I think the theatrical aspect is great. (I do love the inclusion of the Child ballads, which I'm kind of obsessed with, particularly the murder ballads.) But Shirley Jackson did it first and did it better, so why would you want to draw the comparisons?

The characters are pretty unlikeable--petty and jealous and self-centered. That can be fine, but it would be nice if they'd been a little more likeable before the house got ahold of them, so we could get a bigger progression. The bi characters are cheaters, which isn't a great look. There are plot threads that kind of go nowhere and actions that aren't explained. (Why would someone who doesn't want anyone near Hill House seemingly chase someone up there? If the cook needs the money so badly, why is he willing to risk being openly hostile to people who are providing his only source of income? And why the multiple rounds of speculation on whether he's beating his wife when we never get any closer to an answer? Etc.)

Also, a quibble, but one that annoys me to no end: Elizabeth Sawyer wasn't burned, though they said it SEVERAL times in the novel. She was hanged.

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Largely gripping story of teenage brutality

Revisado: 08-14-23

The book explores a brutal crime--only partially premeditated--perpetrated by a group of young teens on another and follows the ramifications of that crime in their lives and their community. It's mostly very good. The author's perspective is not one of a crime writer, but a fiction writer, and so the narrative is sometimes a bit more artful and empathetic than I was expecting.

It does begin to drag a bit towards the end, as we go through several trials and hear dozens of versions of the story from the teens involved, but I almost didn't mind, because it mirrors what must have felt like an unending saga for the community and the participants.

The narrator reads well and with feeling, but sometimes makes questionable choices--maybe don't do the Punjabi accents of these real people, and please never try a blaccent again. But on the whole I found her very good.

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Pretty solid slasher let down by poor narration

Revisado: 01-30-23

I was pretty stoked when I heard Adrienne King would be narrating this book, though admittedly it still took me a while to get to it. I should've lowered my expectations. Scream Queen? Yes. Audiobook narrator? No. Sorry, Adrienne.

As to the book itself, it's a fun ride. I don't have too much to say about it except that if your LEAST favorite part of slasher movies is telling the fleeing and fighting victims not to do stupid things, this might not be the book for you. Our heroine makes some staggeringly stupid decisions.

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Tense and beautiful

Revisado: 11-22-22

Blair knows a thing or two about surviving in nature. I don't know that I'd call this a survival thriller, exactly... It's got thriller aspects--some of the tensest stuff for me was actually before the big event that moves the rest of the plot forward--and it's got lots of survival, of course, but it's a beautiful, occasionally brutal story of learning to build a community when you have nothing else to lean on.

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Still alarmingly relevant

Revisado: 08-01-22

My father recommended this book to me during a conversation about the Coal Wars. He'd read it in college. It's very of its time in some ways. (This book might have the greatest number of racial slurs per page of any book I've ever read outside of maybe Huck Finn. The usage isn't really intentionally malicious, but it's shocking to modern ears all the same.) Still, the book does a good job of giving a solid timeline of tragedy, explaining how the region wound up in the condition it pretty well remains in.

The most emotionally brutal segments come in the late chapters where he brings us up to the then-present day, giving us the accounts of people who were raised to do one thing for the rest of their lives--mine coal--and found time and technology passing them by, dooming them and their children to poverty and inadequate educations.

The author has a VERY distinct point of view and I imagine there are Kentucky historians who might disagree with some of his characterizations of the state's history. And I'm curious as to whether any of the reforms he called for in the end ever came to pass. But I'll be honest here: not so interested that I'm likely to pick up another book on the subject.

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A revenge folktale more than a horror novel

Revisado: 09-22-21

While I concede to the negative reviewers that there is indeed too much basketball, I have to say, Stephen Graham Jones can write. This book isn't scary, really. I can see how horror fans might be disappointed. There's a lot of tension in it, but it's more a Hitchcockian 'show the audience the bomb under the table up front so they'll be waiting for it to explode the whole time' than a slasher movie 'the calls are coming from inside the house' scenario.

The act that sparks the action may not seem like much, but we're in folklore territory now--it's about violating and forgetting traditions and dishonoring nature more than anything. And the revenge is... messy. (I was not prepared for the level of violence against dogs in this book. Spoiler: Not a single dog makes it out alive, and that it's mostly off the page is the smallest mercy.)

The book is divided into four narrative parts, each focusing on a different character, or set of characters, in a connected narrative. The second section, focusing on Lewis, is by far the most traditionally horrific. We get to watch a man slowly, and then much more rapidly, unravel in the face of his tremendous guilt--guilt at the act he committed a decade ago, guilt at leaving his people behind, guilt at not being Indian enough, guilt at not being enough in general, all of which is laced through his increasingly frantic thoughts.

The book does get bogged down a little in the third section, but it's also valuable and illuminating for character and cultural context.

The narration is solid, too. Shaun Taylor-Corbett does a nice job of making the characters sound distinct, even in the narrative text, when he switches from one perspective to another.

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Brutal stories, well-narrated

Revisado: 09-02-21

i did struggle to finish this one because there are only so many times you can read variants of "This chief you've heard of trusted the white people and rode out under a truce flag wearing the medal he'd been given by the President and was shot down without a warning and his people were massacred" before it really starts to eat at you.

The book itself though is excellent and unsparing in its detail. Dee Brown, for a white man, does a good job (to my also white eyes, anyway) of illustrating the history from a Native American perspective. For all that, he doesn't whitewash the actions of the Native Americans, when they committed acts that would be war crimes if done now. He just puts those acts in their proper context: The slow and methodical genocide of every native people in what is now the US. There are no noble savages here, just people trying to survive among those who only do them endless grievous wrongs.

The narrator, too, does a great job. I can't speak to the accuracy of his pronunciations, but he certainly seems to have made a good attempt at it. He delivers the words of these lost leaders with the dignity they deserve.

I wish I'd been taught from this book in school instead of fed lie after lie about the friendships between the white colonists and the indigenous populations.

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The very definition of "middling"

Revisado: 12-09-20

In the end, the problem is really that... not much happens. So there's a disappearance, years before the book takes place, but you're not really given any reason to care. This is a full-cast recording and, as is often the case, performance quality varies. At its best, this book has a kind of misty, nostalgic folk-horror quality, like a memory of watching The Wicker Man on a crisp autumn night years ago. But it doesn't hit those notes for long, alas. It does rather leave one wanting to listen to a lot of Fairport Convention, though.

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