Novels

THE REFRIGERATOR MONOLOGUES (2017)

December 28, 2021

I once saw a post on Twitter from someone who said their partner once told them this:

“You think you’re the protagonist in this relationship. You are not. This is my story.”

THE REFRIGERATOR MONOLOGUES, from Catherynne M. Valente (with illustrated plates from HAWKEYE and BLACK CANARY artist Annie Wu), reminded me of that stinging barb, even though it’s ostensibly focused merging the confessional honesty and anger of THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES play with the ‘women in refrigerators’ comic book trope.

If you aren’t familiar with THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES, Eve Ensler interviewed 200 women about their experiences about being a woman, which she then turned into a series of stage-based monologues.

Regarding ‘women in refrigerators’, it’s a term that comic book writer Gail Simone coined for when a woman is killed in a comic solely to heighten the dramatic and narrative potential of a superhero the woman is involved with, 99.5% of the time an uninteresting dude.

Valente was inspired by both but, instead of using the prefab characters of the Marvel and DC universes, she would weave her own, which makes for a far more inventive, insightful, creative commentary on how writers use intriguing characters full of depth as disposable props.

The novella takes place in Deadtown, a seedy literal Hell-hole of a town, at a bar populated by gargoyle bartenders. A clutch of misfit outsider young women gather there once a week, self-named the ‘Hell Hath Club’. The members come and go, depending on the circumstances of their place in the living world, but it’s always women who have been ‘friged’.

The Hell Hath members who tell their story range the gamut from a brilliant lab scientist who watches her lab partner turn into Kid Mercury (basically THE FLASH) to an Atlantean punk rocker-in-line-to-be-queen who falls in love with half-human/half-Atlantean Avast (basically AQUAMAN) to a talented photographer who has a sickeningly adorable relationship with a graphic designer/graffiti artist who finds a charm that allows him to draw things to life.

Their involvement with these men all lead to their death, and they become little more than footnotes in their prior boyfriends’ lives, but thanks to these monologues, they — and Valente — are able to detail their stories, their frustrations, their rage, their idiosyncrasies, and turn the limelight on to their trauma and troubles, to become the protagonist in their own story.

While I obviously loved this book, teenage me would have fallen in love with it. THE REFRIGERATOR MONOLOGUES is rebellious while being amazingly sharp. It opens your eyes to how so-called loved ones/characters are treated as disposable, how they only exist in service of the male character, and how that’s a reflection of society at large, and it does so all the while having a bit of fun, riffing on so many bits of pop culture, including a little snippet of an Atlantean version of LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS’ -Skid Row-!

One last note: Amazon had plans to adapt THE REFRIGERATOR MONOLOGUES into a series called DEADTOWN but, since that was back in 2019, it’s probably safe to say that the project has been friged.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Refrigerator-Monologues/Catherynne-M-Valente/9781481459358

BURNT OFFERINGS (1976)

December 27, 2021

(VOD) I happened to read Robert Marasco’s 1973 horror novel BURNT OFFERINGS a few years ago, a properly enigmatic ‘house possesses and feeds off of its guests’ work, focused more on male/paternal/provider anxieties that hasn’t necessarily aged as well as one would hope, but it’s an intriguing enough qualified read.

I had absolutely no idea that, not only had it been adapted into a feature film in 1976, but that it has a surprising roster that features Oliver Reed as Ben, the father who drags his family to a spacious, yet dilapidated, summer house for vacation, Karen Black as Marian, his wife, Bette Davis as Aunt Elizabeth, as well as Burgess Meredith and Eileen Heckart as the brother and sister renting the house to the family.

As you might suspect based on the roll call, what ends up on the screen is an eclectic oil-and-water mix of performances: Reed brings an old-school stiffness that occasionally balloons to an overly grandiose show; Karen Black plays it a bit more naturalistic, bringing a haunted quality to the film, and Bette Davis gleefully leans into the creep factor of the aunt’s ailing body. Only Meredith and Heckart bring a playful vibe to the film, but it helps that they’re both on-screen for less than ten minutes.

While the film mostly hews close to the novel’s original tale, which primarily consists of putting the family’s young son David (Lee Montgomery) through the physical and psychological wringer, it deviates in two important ways. First, director Dan Curtis inserted a bit of back story for Ben where he keeps seeing a pale, grinning chauffeur, first at his mother’s funeral. Allegedly, this was a bit of dream-inspiration on Curtis’ part, but it slots into the adaptation quite well. Second, the end is significantly more close-ended and shocking than the source material but, again, it suits the work.

Tonally, the film is far more interesting, if not occasionally maddening, especially given how it contrasts against similar horror films of the time. It’s not quite a throwback, but it doesn’t quite embrace the evolving style and leniency of 70s horror.

Warning: the trailer pulls no punches and spoils some of the biggest moments of the film.

THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP (2021)

November 7, 2021

There aren’t many genres I actively dislike, but the slasher genre is one of them. Sure, I’ve read and watched more of them than the average person — even recommended a few (FINAL DESTINATION 2 in particular) — but I often treat slasher pieces like homework, that they’re often cruel and misogynistic, and am always pleasantly surprised when they turn out to be intelligent and have something to say (e.g. SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE (1982 — I haven’t had a chance to check out the reboot yet) and WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE).

Near the end of October, I was running out of horror novels to read, and the feminist bookstore down the block predictably didn’t stock much in the way of horror, and most of what they had on the shelf I’d already read except for one book: Grady Hendrix’s THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP. I hemmed and hawed about a dude writing a horror novel about women, violence, and trauma, but looked at the back and all of the blurbs were from women authors who I am big fans of, so I decided to give it a chance. (For what it’s worth, I didn’t realize until later that my wife had previously gifted me a copy of PAPERBACKS FROM HELL, which he also penned, earlier this year.)

THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP takes place in an alternate ~2010 universe that asks the question: what if all of the slasher film franchises we know — HALLOWEEN, FRIDAY THE 13th, SCREAM, NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, etc. were based on real-life events, and the final girls were real, and 20-30 years after the fact, after their film franchises have faded, how would they be coping, and how would their lives turn out? Well, they are in a therapy group to chew over their experiences, and have been for quite some time.

That said, some of them are doing worse than others, and that goes from bad to worse once it’s apparent that someone is murderously chasing after all of them. Again.

In the wrong hands, this novel could have been schlocky, insensitive garbage but, instead, it’s a surprisingly sensitive portrayal of living with trauma and fear. While Hendrix is lifting a lot from prior sources, he doesn’t revel in it, there’s not a lot of winking — it’s more along the lines of ‘oh, I see what you did there’ — and he makes the characters distinct, separate and often more interesting than the composites he is working from.

It’s also thrillingly plotted, with deft feints and twists and turns. In other words, it’s the total package.

I was initially attracted to horror when I realized that it could be more than sensationalism, when it also served as a way to highlight matters of humanity — especially emotional matters — that many refuse to acknowledge or publicly discuss. THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP goes above and beyond that, and is a surprisingly brilliant example of what the genre is capable of.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/658406/the-final-girl-support-group-by-grady-hendrix/

THE TOLL (2017)

October 8, 2021

I mostly know of Cherie Priest as a steampunk novelist, but THE TOLL is one wild, southern gothic weird fiction tale. It kicks off with newlyweds Titus and Melanie driving to honeymoon in the Okenfenokee Swamp. They drive over a bridge and then Titus wakes up, prone, outside his car. Melanie is nowhere to be found. He ventures to the nearest town, Staywater, for help, and matters only get stranger.

Priest peppers her characters with plenty of verve, especially two older sisters who happen to be two extremely badass geriatric witches. If you scrutinize the events and actions, it doesn’t exactly hang together, and the conclusion might feel a tad unsatisfying depending on what you expect, but the journey is a damn rip-roaring time.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765378231

THE SILENT COMPANIONS (2018)

October 2, 2021

Upon reading the first chapter of Laura Purcell’s THE SILENT COMPANIONS and the detailing of recently-widowed woman greeting a looming Victorian estate that resided in the middle of nowhere, I was a tad worried that it was yet another architectural horror work, of which I am a tad burned out on at the moment.

As I read on, I discovered that THE SILENT COMPANIONS is more of a ‘haunted object/grounds’ work, centered around a litany of hand-carved, hand-painted wooden depictions of youths and adults alike that evoked a certain Victorian ‘uncanny valley’, pieces named ‘silent companions’.

I digress — let us get back to the recently-widowed woman. Said widower is Elsie, a woman in her mid-20s who grew up working in her father’s match factory, and has the flame-scarred hands to prove it, as she burned them trying to put out a fire and, as her father went to rescue her, he fell into a sawmill, and that was the end of him. Her mother died shortly after, leaving her to take care of her younger brother Jolyon, and the two inherited the match factory.

Later, three investors come by, sniffing around to purchase the now-ailing factory. Both Elsie and Jolyon sit down with these three men, two object to Elsie’s inclusion, and her willfulness drives all but the third off, a Mr. Rupert Bainbridge. He invests in the factory, saving it, and weds Elsie — elevating her social status.

Elsie ends up marrying Rupert, and is elated to be marrying above her station, to live in London, waited on by staff and wearing finery. She discovers she’s pregnant, and Rupert sets off to their rural estate to make it fit for the three of them to live in but, sadly, he dies shortly after. Cue Elsie’s trip to estate.

What follows is a tightly interwoven generational tales about the house, the silent companions purchased by prior ancestors that haunt the estate, and flashforwards to Elsie in an asylum.

It is a lot, but it is measuredly spooled out and, while it doesn’t quite hang together at the end, it’s a thrilling read. The standout part of the novel itself is Elsie herself, who is a fascinatingly prickly woman, one who managed to rise above her station in hopes for greater comforts, then spends the bulk of her internal monologuing at the Bainbridge estate grousing about the lack of manners and fashion codes of her aides and staff. Well worth reading, especially if you are a Sarah Waters fan.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/554573/the-silent-companions-by-laura-purcell/

AGENTS OF DREAMLAND (2017)

September 24, 2021

I first read Caitlín R. Kiernan via their excellent weird fiction tale THE RED TREE, and recently read praise for their novella AGENTS OF DREAMLAND, the first in a Lovecraftian/SCP Foundation-adjacent trilogy called TINFOIL DOSSIER. Upon finishing it, I was impressed by how stylistically it differs from THE RED TREE, and how ornate it is while being immensely agreeable. The novella consists of multiple point-of-views regarding a mysteriously horrific incident that involves a cultish leader.

While AGENTS OF DREAMLAND intriguingly sets up the crisis and builds out the agency investigating the issue, it’s slightly disappointing that it’s ultimately a prologue, and fizzles well before the end. While I’m excited to read the rest of the trilogy — the last in the series was published in 2020 — DREAMLAND doesn’t quite satisfy as an individual work. I will fully grant that I should not expect it to — while I haven’t read the other two books, I believe it functions exactly as Kiernan intended — however, when I initially tucked into it I didn’t quite realize that was the goal, and felt slightly disappointed with the conclusion.

To riff on the ‘it’s not a season of TV, it’s a 12-hour movie’ sentiment, the TINFOIL DOSSIER series is not so much three novellas, but a three-part novel.

CURIOUS TOYS (2019)

September 21, 2021

I discovered the novel CURIOUS TOYS via a ‘most exciting upcoming horror novels in 2019’ post and was immediately gripped by the fact that it took place in 1915 Chicago and featured carnival workers. Buy me a ticket for that ride!

Upon reading it, it brought back memories of Lauren Beukes’ THE SHINING GIRLS (finally being realized as an Apple TV+ mini-series after many setbacks, under the title SHINING GIRLS). Both take place in old Chicago, both feature a predatory serial killer who kills young girls/women, and both have far more to say about women living in Chicago than to be victims, and both are well-worth your time.

(That said, CURIOUS TOYS isn’t nearly as high-concept as THE SHINING GIRLS, but to explain why would wade into spoiler territory, and I’ve digressed enough.)

CURIOUS TOYS starts off in Little Hell, a.k.a. Little Italy, a section of Chicago mostly ruled by the ‘Black Hand’ mafia. If you’ve seen CANDYMAN (the original — I can’t vouch for the latest as I have yet to see it) then you’ve seen the locale of Little Hell, as the Cabrini-Green projects were built there. If you’re wondering, Little Hell was named that because of the monstrous industrial factory there that lit up the horizon like a nightmare, and was often used by the Black Hand to incinerate bodies.

14-year-old Pin is a young, headstrong, burgeoning but confused queer girl, moved from Little Hell to live in a shack on the Riverview Park carnival, passing the summer until Pin can enrole in high school. Her stern, young mother has wrangled a job as a fortune teller, and dresses Pin as a boy ‘just until it’s safe.’ Pin does odd jobs for the ‘She-Male’ carnival performer Max (barkers declare him as ‘half-man/half-woman’), mostly delivering drugs to Chicago’s nascent film production studios, including screenwriter Lionel who works at Essanay Studios, which briefly produced many of Chaplin’s early films.

One day, Pin witnesses a girl a few years younger than her jump in a boat for the ‘Hell Gate’ water ride with an older man. She sees the man return solo, and she investigates the ride and finds the dead girl’s body.

What follows is a trifurcated detective fiction story, featuring real Chicagoan outsider artist Henry Darger — who has tasked himself with overseeing the girls in Riverview Park — and ex-detective, current Riverview Park muscle Francis Bacon (no relation to the artist), and Pin trying to track down this killer of girls.

Despite the fact that author Elizabeth Hand lives primarily in Maine and London, this is a surprisingly in-depth historical detective fiction novel that does right by Chicago. I’m familiar with the Riverview Park because of the old Riverview Tavern that was located by Roscoe & Damen. The Riverview Tavern not only had great burgers, but they also had a ton of Riverview Park memorabilia artfully placed around the significantly sized pub. (Sadly, they closed a few years ago. Hopefully they found a good home for the memorabilia.) While the Riverview Park was centrally located at Roscoe & Western, it took up a surprisingly large area of northern Chicago while it was active, until it closed in the mid 1960s.

As you may have guessed by some of the quoted terminology used above, some elements of this story may be problematic. I can’t go into most of them without delving into spoilers, but I believe Elizabeth Hand does attempt to contextualize them, but I feel the need to note it. (I’m not the only one to question this: if you aren’t afraid of spoilers, see https://www.npr.org/2019/10/20/771315664/curious-toys-gets-itself-into-unnecessary-trouble )

That aside — and that’s a pretty big unspoken matter to set aside but, chances are, if you’re reading this and would be upset by it, you know what I’m talking about — it’s an exacting, thrillingly, plotted tale about the city I hold dear, and the city I love to learn about, and I especially appreciated the epilogue, but I wish the author had handled the crux of the book differently.

If you’d like to know more: Chicagoan mystery novelist Lori Rader-Day (UNDER A DARK SKY, -also- well-worth your time, and the author of the upcoming DEATH AT GREENWAY) interviewed her during the CURIOUS TOYS press tour.

GIRL ONE (2020)

September 3, 2021

GIRL ONE, Sara Flannery Murphy’s second novel, is a multi-faceted, complex piece of feminist thriller, self-described as ‘ORPHAN BLACK meets Margaret Atwood’ which is a succinct way to label it. The story kicks off in the 1970s, where nine girls were born over time by nine women, without the need of sperm, procreating exact younger copies of themselves. However, the scientist behind this method was Joseph Bellanger, an older man with a wife and two sons, but he still felt like the nine girls were also his kin, and he wasn’t shy about showing them off to the media.

All of the women and girls live on the Homefront, a compound located in rural Vermont. One night, a fire breaks out and Bellanger and Girl Nine (Fiona) fail to make it out. All of the scientific notes — which were never shared with anyone — go up in smoke. The fire is blamed on a rabble-rousing preacher who proclaimed that this event would bring about the end of men, and said Bellanger would burn in hell. He was convicted of setting fire to the compound and thrown into jail. The women detach from each other and try to live separate lives with their daughter.

Fast-forward to 1994. Girl One, Josephine Marrow — or Josie — was the first born, and she’s had a fractured relationship with her mother, Margaret Marrow, especially after she declared to her mother that she wished to continue her ‘father’s’ work. In the midst of her exams at the University of Chicago (genre writers really love both Chicago -and- Vermont, as it seems like two-thirds of the books I read take place in either region), she hears about her mother’s home catching fire, and that her mother cannot be found. Josie sets out to locate her, which inevitably intertwines her with the other Homestead mothers and daughters on a journey of discovery.

This is not a subtle work, but it’s not meant to be. It is primarily — but not completely — focused on exploring the desperate throes of a patriarchal society when threatened. The nine girls were pilloried by many as the downfall of men and society in general, at least until Bellanger’s death. The girls — most of them women by now — still have to suffer a litany of labors at the hands of men in order to get the answers they need, and it becomes increasingly clear to Josie that they’re seen as dangerous aberrations.

Reading this over the past week, I’m obviously struck by the parallels with the enacted abortion restrictions in Texas, the power struggle and suppression and, while anyone who has been paying attention to the GOP over the the years has seen this coming, it’s heartbreaking, and GIRL ONE wrangles that frustration and anger and turns it into one hell of a well-constructed tale. (It’s worth noting that Murphy lives in Utah.)

While the prose occasionally falters, it’s thrillingly plotted. Even better, all of the women are more or less assholes in one way or another, with traits like being: aloof, vain, willful to the point of blindness, over-protective, or overly combative. No one here is quintessentially heroic, but they are human, and you root for them because you realize their flawed traits are born out of necessity. It’s a very inventive and engrossing take on, not only, the Frankenstein tale, but also witch folklore.

Girl One

(One more thing: it’d make one hell of a TV mini-series.)

THE TURNOUT (2021)

August 20, 2021

I have not been shy about boosting Megan Abbott over the years; QUEENPIN — her third novel — was a foundational text for me. Upon initially reading it, I asked myself the same question that I’ve asked myself upon consuming other transformative works: “You can get away with this?”

QUEENPIN is a lurid and lusty piece of neo-noir about a smart but young woman who falls in doing accounting work for questionable people, and matters quickly escalate into a very combative piece about two willful women butting heads and committing increasingly terrible acts.

That’s Abbott’s oeuvre in a nutshell. She’s all about the power dynamics of female relationships, appetites, and those who take advantage of the those facets. Perfect material for neo-noir but — as Abbott quickly sussed out — also well-suited for young adult novels, of which she penned a handful of (including the cheerleading YA-noir DARE ME, which she adapted into a canceled too soon USA TV show).

THE TURNOUT is the first book of hers in some time to feature an adult protagonist and players. Granted, it still focuses on extraordinarily physical youth-centric endeavors — this time ballet — and has a number of teen flashbacks, but the endgame here is all about the adults and living with the wreckage of their youth.

It’s a tale of two sisters — Dara, a flinty ice queen, and Marie, mercurial and immature — who run their dead mother’s ballet studio. For years, Dara and Marie and Dara’s husband Charlie, also an ex-dancer who grew up alongside them, lived under their dead parents’ roof. Marie decides to move out, opting to live in the attic of the studio, which used to be their mother’s private space.

A fire breaks out in the studio and they enlist Derek — a smooth-talking contractor — to repair the space while they prepare for their annual NUTCRACKER slate of performances, and matters spiral from there.

Abbott’s prose and internal monologues have traditionally been her strengths, but THE TURNOUT has a lot of repetitive dialogue between characters, a number of redundant explanations, and the plotting also feels a little too neat, a little too exacting.

However, this is still an Abbott book, and those are nitpicks. It is vividly enthralling, with rich and complex characters about an under-examined artistic and physical medium, there’s more than a bit of du Maurier regarding how Abbott treats the dilapidated house and studio, and she definitely sticks the landing. It’s well-worth your time if you’re into off-beat thrillers and personas.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611535/the-turnout-by-megan-abbott/

NIGHTSHADE (2020)

July 20, 2021

I initially picked up Annalena McAfee’s NIGHTSHADE because of the cover, but the front-cover puff quote from THE OBSERVER really grabbed me: “A glorious novel. … Full of twisted sexuality, art and power. … Brutal and unforgettable.” It’s a rather generic remark, yes, but I bought it because I wanted a ticket for that ride.

It did not disappoint, and the puff quote is entirely accurate. I’ll note in advance that, due to how the book is paced, this is a very difficult novel to summarize and I’d hate to give anything away.

Protagonist Eve Laing is a prickly, spiteful painter in her sixties who has had some success with her realistic portrayals of flowers in her works, notably in substituting flowers for the London Underground tube map. She’s brainstormed a new work, one focused on poisonous flowers, which is meant to be her magnum opus.

At first, NIGHTSHADE feels in the vein of Margaret Atwood’s CAT’S EYE (a personal favorite) in that it’s an older creative substantially reflecting on their artistic and personal life while navigating a city.

Then it takes a turn. Then another. And another.

It takes a while to unfurl but, if you have the patience for it, you will be rewarded.

http://www.annalenamcafee.com/nightshade.html