a book and cocktail blog
So this book was under the horror label at the library and I guess it kind of was, but mostly it was just weird. Don’t get me wrong, it was darkly funny and enjoyably weird, but weird.
I can’t even begin to recap it. I can’t. It was drugs, and aliens, and time travel and…it was insane. I do recommend it for the pure insanity. It really was funny. But…oof. What a wacky shitshow.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a classic and one I’d been planning to read since I was about 12. Finally got to it at 30. Oooffff.
Basic premise: Count Dracula is trying to move from Transylvania to England in order to spread his undead curse, and the story follows the small group of men and one woman battling against him, led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing (the other most famous character to come out of this book).
Interestingly, I feel the need to add the premise here. Count Dracula one of the most famous characters in all of fiction – definitely the most famous vampire and possibly the most famous in all of horror fiction. He has influenced vampire lore and hundreds, if not thousands, of stories over the last 122 years. But I’m willing to bet that, at this point, most people are not familiar with the original tale. I only had a vague idea of it.
Unlike another original horror story I’ve read – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – I actually liked this one. The story was pretty well paced, I enjoyed the villain as a villain, and it was a lot of fun hearing all the old stuff I knew about vampires in its original context.
The only thing I didn’t like about this book, and I admit it was a minor flaw, was the constant meetings of what my grandmother would call the “mutual admiration society.” Nobody was ever just called by their name – Arthur, John, Lucy, Mina, etc – there was always at least two adjectives describing the person before their name followed by a description of their personality. “Dear, sweet Lucy who was always so kind and gentle,” or “Brave, stoic Arthur who put on a good face for his wife…”
…throughout the entire book. And all the descriptions were favorable. ALL OF THEM, except for the ones of Dracula and his ilk, nobody had a bad word to say about anybody. This was so over the top that it was comical. I mean, I know the Victorians were a courteous lot, but come on.
Anyway, aside from the over the top, over flattering descriptions, I truly enjoyed Dracula. So many hours of fun with other books, movies, stories came from Bram Stoker’s book. It’s one hell of a legacy for a guy who was best known as an actor’s personal assistant when he was alive.
I can’t remember exactly why I decided that my next book would be Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. Frequently, I end up putting a book on hold (basically putting my name on the list to listen to it) and take another out for the present moment. I think that might be what happened here. I know the podcast is highly rated, but the novel gets mixed reviews.
I enjoyed the novel itself but the person who read the audiobook’s voice drove me crazy. I want to say it was Cecil Baldwin, but I can’t swear to it. I liked the novel, in spite of this, but it took me awhile to warm up to it.
Night Vale is a place where they are used to the strange and bizarre, but the return of The Man in the Tan Jacket leaving people pieces of paper that say “King City” has put the town at odds. Jackie Fierro, who owns the city’s pawn shop, wants answers about King City and The Man in the Tan Jacket. Meanwhile, Diane’s son has hit puberty and become a shapeshifter, which is making life quite difficult for Diane. Additionally, his father is back in town for unknown reasons, but her son has taken an interest in him, which is bad news.
Jackie and Diane, who end up with a sort of frenemy relationship, must brave the oddities of Night Vale, including the library, in order to solve their respective mysteries.
This novel, while I enjoyed it, was clearly for people familiar with the podcast. I have no issue with this, but it made the start of the novel difficult to follow. I think there may have also been references in there that I didn’t fully understand. It took me a while to fully get into it and understand everything about it.
Once you are able to get into it, the novel is interesting, creepy, and darkly, darkly funny. The middle to the end of the book is much better than the start.
It did make me want to listen to the podcast. I haven’t gotten to it yet, but I will. If the podcast is better than the book, it will be worth it.
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova may have been my favorite book of 2018 for its detail, complexity, and the blending of the history and folklore of Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler) and his fictional counterpart, Count Dracula.
It kicked off a series of Dracula books for me in 2018. Dracula is a fascinating legend to begin with, and as I said previously, I did a lot of “scary” in 2018. The Historian isn’t a typical “horror” story but there are a lot of elements of it, and it’s definitely a suspenseful book. I’d put it mostly under historical fiction, but it’s a lot more complicated than that.
The Historian is a story within a story. It’s actually a story within a story within a story, but it begins to get confusing if you think about it too hard, and it really wasn’t a confusing book. Don’t get me wrong – it was long and quite dense. I did the audiobook version and it was 24 hours? 26? It was long. But it wasn’t confusing.
The unnamed narrator, in Amsterdam in the 1970s, finds a vellum book with a woodcut of a dragon associated with Dracula, and she asks her father, Paul, about it. He explains that he found it in his study carrel during his time as a graduate student in the 1950s. He took it to his mentor/advisor, Professor Bartholomew Rossi, and discovered Rossi had also found one when he was a graduate student in the 1930s. Rossi researches Vlad Tepes, the Dracula myth, and these mysterious books. Rossi travels as far as Istanbul, but unexplained circumstances and characters send him back to his graduate work at the university and Rossi, in the 1950s, informs Paul that he believes that Dracula is, somehow, still alive. After meeting with Paul, Rossi disappears.
There are smears of blood on Rossi’s desk and on the ceiling, but other than that, everything is in place. The police suspect run of the mill foul play, but Paul is certain that something involved in research into the Dracula legend is to blame for his disappearance.
The majority of the book follows the 1950s story, with cuts in and out to the 1930s and 1970s storylines, with all three of the main characters – the narrator, Paul, and Rossi – researching the Dracula myth in Europe and eventually converging later in the book.
As I said, the blending of history and folklore in this story made it one of my favorites of 2018. There’s tons of cool info about Vlad Tepes, the Dracula legend, and Europe in general. I loved the story surrounding the narrator, Paul, and Rossi as well as the ambiguous ending.
The Historian was one of those books that made me sad it was over, like it should have kept going, like there was even more story that could have been told. It was so good that I jumped on Kostova’s The Swan Thieves, which ended up being one of the books I returned early and didn’t finish last year. I don’t know if Kostova is a one hit wonder, but if she is, I very much enjoyed and highly recommend this one hit. If you enjoy history and folklore like I do, I think you’ll like The Historian as well.
Doll Bones was the first of three stories I read by Holly Black in 2018. I didn’t realize it was a YA book when I started it, but I liked it enough to continue listening once I realized it was.
The story is about three kids named Zach, Poppy, and Alice who all play together and, now, at about 12 years old are caught between being kids and being teenagers. One of the characters in their game, the Great Queen, is based on a doll Poppy’s mother keeps in a case. Poppy, not wishing to grow up and wishing to keep her friends close to her (she’s figured out Alice has a crush on Zach and that Zach is now, for a reason unknown to her but revealed to the reader, embarrassed by the fact he plays with them) tells her friends that she had a dream about the Great Queen, and she’s actually a haunted doll made of human remains that wants to be put back in the cemetery where she belongs.
Poppy, Alice, and Zach end up on a quest to return the doll to its rightful resting place.
This was a good story that captured the heartache of adolescence so well. Everything’s hard, everything’s awkward, everything feels like the end of the world, even though it isn’t. I related too well to Poppy’s sense of losing her friends, to Alice’s crush on Zach, to Zach’s embarrassment about doing “baby” things but still loving them.
That said, the “horror” aspect to this story was a little weak. It wasn’t clear if the doll was haunted or if the kids were imagining it. A little more background on the girl who was supposed to be haunting them would have been nice too.
I also was sad because it was over too soon. I think the whole audiobook was done in about 5 hours and I wished there was more of it. Or a sequel. Sadly, there’s not.
Doll Bones was a fun one. It also convinced me I wanted to read more of Holly Black’s book, which I did later in 2018.
The Apartment by the S.L. Grey (which I think is actually a pen name for two people, IIRC) was disappointing. Don’t get me wrong, the premise sounds good. From Amazon:
Mark and Steph have a relatively happy family with their young daughter in sunny Cape Town until one day when armed men in balaclavas break in to their home. Left traumatized but physically unharmed, Mark and Steph are unable to return to normal and live in constant fear. When a friend suggests a restorative vacation abroad via a popular house swapping website, it sounds like the perfect plan. They find a genial, artistic couple with a charming apartment in Paris who would love to come to Cape Town. Mark and Steph can’t resist the idyllic, light-strewn pictures, and the promise of a romantic getaway. But once they arrive in Paris, they quickly realize that nothing is as advertised. When their perfect holiday takes a violent turn, the cracks in their marriage grow ever wider and dark secrets from Mark’s past begin to emerge.
Not as good as it sounds.
First, my entertainment curse continued: I figured out where the book was going pretty early on. I didn’t know exactly how it would get there, but it did. I won’t offer many spoilers here, in case you want to read the story. I didn’t find the ending great either. A haunting that travels? Please.
Second, I found the horror aspect of this story underdeveloped. There was not a lot of horror here. In fact, the book seemed a little bit confused about whether it wanted to be a ghost story or a psychological thriller. The mix made it fail a bit at both. It had some suspenseful moments, but overall…meh.
Third, I found Mark and Steph annoying, Mark infinitely more so. Steph was neurotic and paranoid and scared for her daughter, which is plenty annoying, but Mark just…ugh just brooding and whining and self-indulgent.
I will say there are literary references to Daphne du Maurier here. I don’t remember what they were at this point, but I remember thinking that I really enjoyed that aspect of it.
I won’t say that The Apartment is a complete waste of time, but I wouldn’t recommend it, either.
I read (listened to) Carrie as part of my ongoing effort to get through more of Stephen King’s prolific collection of published works.
Sissy Spacek performed the reading and I liked the touch because she played Carrie in the 1976 film.
Of all the Stephen King books I’ve been through so far, and admittedly, I haven’t been through that many, this was probably my least favorite. All of King’s books can be haunting and jarring and all deal with hints of the supernatural and that kind of thing, and Carrie is no different.
But I disliked it because it made me cringe. Carrie’s naivete is hard to deal with, although I guess without sex-ed and the internet you wouldn’t know what your period was. That said, I think I disliked it more because I hate bullies.
Carrie is bullied. Relentlessly. It’s clearly gone on for years before the the start of events actually chronicled in the story and goes on throughout the novel. For all my short comings (and believe me, there are many) I am not a bully, and reading about how every single kid picks on this girl just drove me crazy.
I get that not every kid is going to stick up for the kid getting bullied. But in my experience, there’s usually at least one. I don’t know where authors go to school (because it’s not just King, there are other authors I’ve read who write about kids being bullied and nobody ever stands up for the kid) but usually someone will stick up for the victim. At least where I lived and grew up. I can’t think of any kid who didn’t have any friends or, at the least, a sympathetic classmate. Carrie kind of gets one in Sue Snell, but Sue’s still a little too wishy washy publicly to make a real difference.
I also spent most of the book wishing I could beat Carrie’s mother to death. Carrie’s mom bullies her too, and I don’t particularly understand her religious views, which are basically entirely related to sex and how evil it is, even when you’re married to someone. She’s one of those people that, upon reflection, make you think that maybe there really isn’t enough to do for young people in certain parts of this country in their formative years. Like many of King’s stories, this one takes place in Maine.
I did like the (fake) scientific articles on telekinesis throughout the story. Something about fake science is a lot of fun for me. It sounds like it could be real.
Anyway, Carrie was a good story, but not my favorite. It’s also obviously one of King’s earlier works, and I enjoyed the references to things like payphones and paying a quarter for a burger and soda. Nostalgia is fun, guys!
I keep telling myself I’m going to read more of Stephen King and so this was part of my attempt to keep that promise to myself.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Stephen King (what I’ve read) and I don’t look down on him for not being high literature or anything of the sort. I’m just bad at commitment. But I did TWO Stephen King books this year, the first being this one.
This one was really good.
Stephen King is remarkable at pulling you into a story. In the first few paragraphs, he can hook and reel you in to his stories the way an experience fisherman can reel in a trout. That happened to me here.
The Shining reminded me a lot of The Haunting of Hill House – except much more elaborately fleshed out – and I remembered later that King was a big fan.
Anyway, this has been out for a long time, book and film alike, so I’m not too worried about spoilers. Basically, Jack Torrence is an alcoholic and a screw up, and in an ongoing effort to rebuild his life, brings his wife, Wendy, and their six year old son, Danny, to the Overlook Hotel, where he’s to be the caretaker for the winter.
The Overlook is nestled in an extremely picturesque but remote part of the Rocky Mountains and nearly impossible to reach safely once winter comes and the snow starts in earnest (November-ish). The family will be months without contact from the outside world.
The story is told from several points of view, the main one being Jack’s, but also with Wendy, Danny, and a gentleman name Dick Hallorann, who, like Danny, has what he calls “the shine.” The shine is telepathic abilities that allow Danny to read minds and have premonitions, both awake and asleep. Each person’s “shining” varies in strength and ability, but Hallorann tells Danny that Danny’s is very strong.
Meanwhile, strange things start happening at the Overlook once all the guests are gone, and we learn more and more about its history, which is fairly dark. At first, things begin strangely. Stuff just seems off, and Danny won’t go to certain parts of the hotel and its grounds because, unbeknownst to his parents, he sees things there. Wendy and Danny both figure out before they’re trapped that it would be best to leave the hotel, either with or without Jack (who is on his last chance from his last remaining friend) but decide to stay because they think in the end the experience will help the family.
But things begin to spiral in earnest once the family is trapped by the snow, and Jack, Wendy, and Danny all start seeing ghosts from the Overlook’s past. While Wendy and Danny are both also experiencing hallucinations and ghosts from the Overlook’s checkered past, both remain the same in terms of behavior. But Jack’s alcoholic habits all reappear without actually drinking, including constantly wiping his mouth, popping Excedrin without water and verbally abusive, sometimes physically violent, outbursts.
Long story short, Jack loses his mind entirely, Danny has to call for help to Hallorann using “the shine” because this story was written before cellphones and the phone lines were out and Jack destroyed their radio, and they barely get out of the Overlook alive. For those who aren’t familiar (all five of you), I’m not clarifying who “they” are, but they do make it out alive.
The Shining is an older book at this point, 40 years old, and Stephen King seems pretty evolved on his social takes, so I wonder how he set out to write Jack and how he views him, then and now. We learn pretty early on in the book that Jack broke Danny’s arm after an alcoholic binge for a minor infraction, and while Jack has spent years trying to make up for it, I never really liked him after finding that out.
Wendy spends a lot of her time as narrator telling the reader about the “real” Jack, but I always viewed Jack as a violent guy who can control himself when he isn’t drinking but whose “real” personality rears its ugly head whenever he meets up with his buddies Jack, Jim, and Johnny. I didn’t like him. And since I did know the premise of the story by just knowing pop culture basics, and knew what was eventually going to happen, I just kept waiting for it.
It was a really good story, but was I supposed to like Jack? Or feel sorry for him? I didn’t. I’m not sure I was supposed to. Wendy’s tolerance of his behavior made me dislike her too, but not to the same extent.
I have a thing about books and movies in closed in spaces where there’s a limited set of characters and circumstances. Clue, The Haunting of Hill House, The Mousetrap, Murder on the Orient Express, And Then There Were None, etc… are some of my favorite stories. Characters are “trapped” in a specific setting and the story has to be clever enough to take away movement as a plot point.
The Shining follows in that tradition. I didn’t like Jack, but I really liked The Shining. And I liked it much better than the film with Jack Nicholson. If you’re going back and forth on picking it up, pick it up.
The first book I read in 2016 was over the weekend we had a blizzard, and that book was Off Season by Jack Ketchum.
It was part of a challenge I was going to do, but in the course of my life between New Year’s and now, lost the list, so I just ended up reading this terrifying book.
Basically, a group of friends from New York City go to Maine where they have a cute cabin, in the resort town’s off season (hence, the name of the book). They end up in a cabin that hasn’t been inhabited in quite some time, and it’s near a group of inbred, cannibalistic savages (who, IIRC, were originally normal people who disappeared in what everybody thought were just legends and who, over the generations of inbreeding, became these monster people).
This is the story that movie The Hills Have Eyes was based on. Really, it’s the old American urban legend of cannibal savages that attack strangers for fun.
It was a good, scary book, but it was really, really violent. This wasn’t a terror story, where you never actually “see” anything – this was a horror story, violence, gore, the works.
It wasn’t the kind of book I normally read when I go for scares, because I prefer terror, which I find more effective. That said, this book was very effective in that it was scary and not JUST gory. The whole idea of inbred cannibals is revolting in and of itself. The fact that they were extra violent just added to the revulsion.
There is no shortage of vivid description in this book, and the story is quick paced, which keeps you interested. I’d say there’s 50 pages or less before the action really picks up. I can’t say for certain that this is the case, as I read the kindle version. There were some clear typos in the kindle version, but it wasn’t too bad. Definitely not a deal breaker…especially since I’m not sure the book is still in print.
I suggest reading this book if you want a gruesome thriller. But not in Maine. Or in the woods. Or the dark. Or anywhere alone. Pleasant nightmares!
I read the majority of Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör at Bryce Canyon National Park.
Bryce Canyon National Park is awesome, but I was much younger than the rest of the people in my party by 30-40 years, and even though I descended down the Navajo Loop Trail and the others went off somewhere else on a less strenuous path, I still got back to the meeting point way faster than anyone else.
Usually I bring books with me but due to the nature of the trip – hiking around Utah – I didn’t want to bring anything with me that wasn’t my camera, food, or water. SOOO the books stayed at the hotel. I parked myself on a bench under a tram stop – stretched out, because it was rainy and not many people were there – and, in addition to listening to middle aged people compare quality of life in Texas vs. California, downloaded and read Horrorstör on my phone.
Like Hallowe’en Party, this was read in the spirit of Halloween, which greatly influenced the choice. I’m not sure how I came about it – it may have been an Amazon monthly deal – but it fit the Halloween theme of October, and since it was relatively short, I figured it was a good book to read on my phone (which I hate doing).
Horrorstör takes place in a large IKEA like boxstore of home furniture, called Orsk. This Orsk store is a relatively new location, where protagonist Amy is living paycheck to paycheck, and regretting most of her life choices. Some strange incidents have started happening in the store, such as vandalism to merchandise overnight when nobody is there without evidence of a break in, and a number of characters experience the feeling of getting helplessly and hopelessly lost in a store where things that shouldn’t be moving around (such as entire departments shifting locations) are moving around. Amy is asked to do an overnight shift by her nemesis, manager Basil, along with a number of other “loyal” employees to help catch the perpetrator.
This story, in spite of being a horror story, can be wildly funny. Everything about it, from the idiot teenagers who want the night to be a paranormal activity film, to Ruth Anne, who has no family and has made her Orsk coworkers her family is, in some way another, funny.
The explanation of the mysterious happenings is something we’ve all heard before, and for me, that isn’t surprising even if it is a little disappointing. Horror story motifs are motifs for a reason.
Some of the reviews on Amazon mention that the physical book is laid out like an Orsk catalog. I can’t swear to this, as I read the digital book on my phone, but I’ve read uniquely formatted books before an the formatting typically ads to the experience.
So! In spite of the cliche explanation for such happenings, this story was inventive, funny, and a pretty creepy story, that I really enjoyed and would recommend if horror stories are your thing.
words in scarlet ink 