The house is very, very angry.
Cherie Priest crafts an absolutely terrifying haunted house story about a salvage company that has to camp out in the house they're demolishing, and end up in the middle of some truly horrifying paranormal rage. The house they are working on is creepy in and of itself, but when they find a cemetery on the grounds that no one mentioned and start seeing people who shouldn't be there, things take an even nastier turn. There are some angry and violent ghosts in this house and they are determined to do some damage before the house is torn down. The Family Plot hits all the right notes of a haunted house novel. It is genuinely scary in a way that made me reconsider reading it late at night. The descriptions of the ghosts and the way they manifest is disturbing and Priest manages to do a written jump scare, something I've never seen accomplished before. There's also the added psychological feature of the fact that the main angry ghost, who is one bad apple, latches on to recently divorced Dahlia assuming she is a kindred spirit who can understand the ghost's rage. The combination of inability to leave the house and the evolution of knowing something isn't right to full-blown ghost trying to kill people is deeply effective. For anyone who loved The Haunting of Hill House, this is another book involving a house that refuses to go quietly.
0 Comments
October Book List Theme- Horror by Female Authors: The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell10/26/2018 Never has wood been so terrifying.
The plot of this Victorian Gothic horror revolves around pregnant widow Elsie, who has moved to her late husband's estate in the country. The local village is a mess and right away the house proves very disturbing. Rumors that a witch who was part of the family was killed there after she murdered several of her staff run rampant. Elsie plans on cleaning up the house and moving on with her life, but when she finds some painted wooden figures in a locked room, things go from vaguely unsettling to full blown horrific. The wooden figures, which are very lifelike and rather large, seem to move at their own will. And they also multiply. What builds is a revelation about the supposed witch of the manor and her family, and it turns out Elsie is hiding some secrets of her own. Somehow Purcell manages to make wood very scary. There are bizarre sawing sounds, wooden figures with a life of their own, murderous splinters, and doors and rooms that seem to operate under their own rules. Having haunted stand up figures (envision a modern day cut out of a TV character or celebrity and you can envision what these things look like) be the major threatening feature of your horror novel seems like a risk, but man does it pay off. There's the building sense of horror as you realize there's no way for Elsie to escape from this, and no one outside of the situation is going to believe her, especially when bodies start hitting the floor. Then there's the added twist of revelations about Elsie herself, which throw some interesting speculation into her character. All I can say about this novel is that it is bang up Gothic horror that doesn't just use the mood to be atmospheric, and the ending has real teeth as a horror novel. The building hysteria of the situation is pitch perfect, and the book starts out letting you know how badly this thing is going to end. The best gothic novel I've read in ages, The Silent Companions is terrifying in a way I never expected. On a side note, I bought those obviously cursed wooden figurines from Goodwill for that picture, and now have to live with my choices. If you're looking for something a little different in the way of horror, Nalo Hopkinson's Skin Folk fits the bill. I don't recommend all of the stories in this book, as some are so sex driven as to prove rather unnecessary, but some of the stories in here are great and have a very different tone based on their Caribbean background. "The Glass-Bottle Trick" is a stand out of horror as a twist on the Bluebeard legend. "A Habit of Waste" actually isn't horror so much as it is a sci-fi meditation on what it means to use what you've been given. "Greedy Choke Puppy" is a Caribbean take on vampire lore. "Slow Cold Chick" is a grotesque story about a basilisk. "Tan-Tan and Dry Bone" is maybe the most developed of the stories, as it involves a previous character of the author and is a disturbing take on guilt. Those are the stories I'd stick to in the book, as the rest either aren't as good or are so graphically sex laden that they made reading them rather unpleasant. Hopkinson's stories are heavy on lyricism, and you have to stick with them not always going where you expect or having deeply developed plots. It's a good addition to the horror book list though, just to counter-balance Angela Carter's work.
I'll take a haunted woods over a haunted house any day. There are several in my area with the stand out being Deadland Haunted Woods, which does have some great obstacles to go through as you walk about 2 miles. This year my godson and I decided to go to Myers Haunted Woods in Murfreesboro to try something different. Myers is a little cheaper than Deadland, and much newer.
I was suitably impressed by Myers and what they were able to do with limited setting. The trail felt sufficiently long, and there was plenty to wind your way through. The sets were excellent, with camping trailers being utilized to good effect, as well as hanging sheets proving to be a highly disorienting and effective scare. There is also a built in maze feature that is very nice. Deadland you have to pay extra to go through the maze attraction. With Myers, the maze is part of the actual haunted trail. The scares are a little milder than some of the hardcore haunted attractions this time of year, but I like being startled rather than horrified in a haunted house. This is a haunted attraction preteens are safe going to. My biggest complaint was the fact that I tripped a lot and there were a lot of strobe lights making things disorienting. If you have seizure issues, this isn't the haunted woods for you. All in all it was a fun experience that was worth the money. How do you make an infamous historic event involving cannibalism even more terrifying? You add werewolf and wendigo mythology. The Hunger is about the doomed Donner party, a group that went down in history for making some horrific decisions that led to them being trapped in the mountains in the dead of winter. This version of the Donner party is a group that is rife with power struggles and distrusts, full of people who escaped to the West expecting the secrets they left behind being hidden, but all too soon having them resurface and haunt them, much like whatever is stalking the group. The strength of the book is the beginning, as you'll never find a wide open setting feel more claustrophobic. And as the party continues, the overwhelming feeling of doom is palpable. As families turn on each other, the situation worsens, with some of the families oblivious to the horror that is following them. Suspicions are cast on beautiful and arrogant Tamsen Donner, who some think is a witch, while James Reed, the only man who seems to realize the danger the group is in, is resented for his manner and bullied by the other men. And then there is the unsettling fact there is no wildlife and the local Native Americans have taken to whispering stories about a cursed god.
Alma Katsu makes the wilderness a creeping horror that the settlers can't escape from. The further they head West, the deeper into danger they go, not only from the elements, but from physical monsters. The unsettled family relations also lead to the feeling of dread, as everyone has secrets of such a catastrophic nature they would kill to protect them. The last fourth of the book is a bit rushed after the group realizes what is actually going on, but the rest of it is so strong you will never look at a Conestoga wagon the same way again. October Book List Theme- Horror Books by Female Authors: The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter10/6/2018 This month, in honor of Halloween, my book list is featuring notable horror novels by women. The horror genre is so closely associated with the likes of Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe, that it's common for people to forget that for every H. P. Lovecraft there is a Mary Shelley. That's why this month I'm celebrating the ladies of horror.
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter Anyone looking at the source material for the sanitized Disney versions of fairy tales we're familiar with will quickly realize that fairy tales are dark. Some of them pitch black, in fact. Getting to the happily ever after often involves truly horrible things. And murder. A lot of murder. It's difficult to find a Grimm's that doesn't involve someone getting murdered at some point. And if witches aren't being pushed into ovens in a particular tale, there will be a dead mother looming over the story. Fairy tales are not for the weak. That is where Angela Carter comes in with her slim collection of short stories that retell fairy tales in a voluptuous, feminist light. The women in these stories face down horror with a healthy dose of their own agency. Sleeping Beauty is transformed into a vampire tale. There are two different versions of Beauty and the Beast, one in which no one ends up human in the end. There are werewolves and murderers and a raunchy take on Puss n' Boots, all of it related in luxurious prose. You might recall some of the stories that were adapted into A Company of Wolves, a movie that managed to retain some of Carter's Gothic, opulent magnificence. The stand out story is "The Bloody Chamber", an ominous retelling of "Bluebeard" that creeps toward its ending with the audience well aware of the doom looming over the heroine as she is entrusted with the keys to the castle. This book might not be horror in the most obvious sense, but there is horror there. Horror of what women are and have been subjected to all through history. Horror of men transformed into monsters, or maybe the fact that we're all monsters one way or another looking for others to accept that and set us free. |
AuthorA librarian who likes to travel and experience life. CategoriesArchives
June 2022
|