Shirley Jackson's second novel is one of those literary compositions that begs the question, What's the point? It's too many things all at once: a coming-of-age story, a survivor story, a horror story, a psychological mystery, and a satire of college life. Reading it in several sittings, you never know what you'll encounter from one to the next. It is about seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite who, just before leaving for an all-girls college, is taken into the woods behind her parents' house by a man with evil intentions. What happens to her there is left to our imagination, but it isn't our imagination that really matters: Natalie is a lonely, imaginative child and her experience only exacerbates her mind's distortion of reality -- which gradually, under the additional pressures of college life, blooms into full-blown psychosis. Sounds straightforward enough, but that's just the magic of summarization. In between, Jackson writes thousands of words of over-contextualization to convey a few brief relevant ideas. On the other hand, some of her satire is funny, and there's one truly wicked scene in which a couple of girls who have eyes for the professor Natalie herself is infatuated with use her mercilessly -- but ever so politely. Then, too, Jackson has a marvelous talent for shifting from the everyday to the terrifying in the wink of an eye, as she demonstrates here in two scenes, one toward the beginning, the other at the end. This is a book not without its pleasures, but it isn't on the whole a pleasurable book. Ever so vaguely inspired by the real-life disappearance (not that Natalie disappears, except perhaps psychologically) of Paula Jean Weldon who, in 1946, vanished on a hiking trail in North Bennington, Vermont, where Jackson was living at the time and where her husband was working in the same college Miss Weldon attended.
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Shirley Jackson's second novel is one of those literary compositions that begs the question, What's the point? It's too many things all at once: a coming-of-age story, a survivor story, a horror story, a psychological mystery, and a satire of college life. Reading it in several sittings, you never know what you'll encounter from one to the next. It is about seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite who, just before leaving for an all-girls college, is taken into the woods behind her parents' house by a man with evil intentions. What happens to her there is left to our imagination, but it isn't our imagination that really matters: Natalie is a lonely, imaginative child and her experience only exacerbates her mind's distortion of reality -- which gradually, under the additional pressures of college life, blooms into full-blown psychosis. Sounds straightforward enough, but that's just the magic of summarization. In between, Jackson writes thousands of words of over-contextualization to convey a few brief relevant ideas. On the other hand, some of her satire is funny, and there's one truly wicked scene in which a couple of girls who have eyes for the professor Natalie herself is infatuated with use her mercilessly -- but ever so politely. Then, too, Jackson has a marvelous talent for shifting from the everyday to the terrifying in the wink of an eye, as she demonstrates here in two scenes, one toward the beginning, the other at the end. This is a book not without its pleasures, but it isn't on the whole a pleasurable book. Ever so vaguely inspired by the real-life disappearance (not that Natalie disappears, except perhaps psychologically) of Paula Jean Weldon who, in 1946, vanished on a hiking trail in North Bennington, Vermont, where Jackson was living at the time and where her husband was working in the same college Miss Weldon attended.
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+++1/2 Truly horrific tale of one man's unintentional sojourn with an amoral vivisectionist who carries out his terrible experiments far from the public eye on a small island populated by his bizarre, human-like creations. Vivisection, by the way, is surgical experimentation on live animals; Wells doesn't get into the medical details, fortunately, yet manages in other ways to convey the enormity of Moreau's "House of Pain." Meanwhile, as Moreau concedes and our narrator discovers, the good doctor has so far failed to make his alterations stick, and the creatures he creates soon begin to forget their human qualites and revert to their more primitive natures. Wells' message, that mankind isn't so far removed from his animal past as he might think, is confusing and somewhat self-contradictory, but he doesn't spend a lot of time on it, either. This is a full-frontal assault on our civilized sensibilities, and it is reaching, as critics and literary historians have done, to classify it as science fiction; it is horror through and through. It isn't pleasant, but it's worth reading. Adapted several times for film, most notably in 1932 (as Island of Lost Souls), but also, among others, in 1977 and again in 1996. ++ Another book that isn't nearly as good as the hook. Teenage girl receives note that threatens to expose -- or, worse, to physically make her pay for -- the very serious crime she and three of her friends committed the previous summer. The crime is horrible enough, but the kids' coping strategies are so superficial and routine that one finds oneself almost agreeing with their tormentor -- that these spoiled brats could benefit from a hard dose of reality: they are all more interested in their love lives than what they did that terrible night. If this doesn't quite happen, it is only because the characters aren't compelling enough to provoke much of an emotional reaction either way. With less action than you might expect and a whole lot more lax dialogue than you could ever want. A quick read, though. Revised and reissued in 2010 in order (a) to update the technology and (b) to squelch any sense of history a young reader might have possibly been exposed to. Made into a film in 1997 starring Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar. +++ Novelization of the original film, credited to Lucas but actually ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster. Foster adds nothing of significance to the film, but doesn’t tinker with the story, characters, or dialogue either, making this an enjoyable, if clearly inferior, alternative. In a far-off galaxy, farmboy Luke Skywalker is swept up in a rebellion against an evil empire led by the fearsome Darth Vader. His allies — mystical Obi Wan Kenobi, tough Princess Leia, cynical Han Solo and Chewbacca, and the robots See Threepio and Artoo Detoo — provide variety and humor in a clockwork plot that delivers lots of action and excitement. A good book in the dicey category of novelizations. ++++ Outstanding crime thriller about a successful bank heist and its bloody aftermath (not that the heist itself wasn't bloody enough) as the three robbers try to make good their getaway. Doc, the engaging leader of the gang, is cool, smart, suave, resourceful, and ruthless; everyone likes him (likability is his stock in trade). And yet, through some marvelous sleight of hand, Thompson keeps him at arm's length, turning him neither into hero nor anti-hero, positioning him instead for his highly unusual fate, detailed in an ending that segues into near-fantasy and is both horrific and hilarious. Fast-paced, written with confidence, verve, and humor, and hardboiled as hell. Filmed twice, once in 1972 with Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, then again in 1994, with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. Note: The naval cap worn by the man in the cover painting and anything it might conceivably imply has no relevance whatsoever to this story. +++1/2 "Before The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, there was The Case Against Satan." This is from the blurb on the back of Penguin's 2015 edition of Russell's first novel. It is, for once, an excellent selling point. It's about a Catholic priest, newly assigned to a small-town parish, who discovers that the teenage daughter of a widower may be possessed -- by Satan himself. The evidence for possession is compelling, yet Gregory is a modern priest with contemporary ideas on psychiatry, so for him the case against is equally persuasive. At first. Other than its leap directly to Lucifer, the book has little in common with Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby; on the other hand, if one didn't know better (and, frankly, one doesn't), one would be tempted to say that William Peter Blatty was quite familiar with this book when he wrote his own story of possession, The Exorcist. The parallels are extensive and fascinating, including the scenes of the exorcism itself. That said, while the two books have much in common, they are very different works. To be clear, this is no Exorcist, but horror fans of the latter should be delighted by this earlier book on the same theme, which is just as serious if not as deep and really almost as explicit -- Russell doesn't pull his punches. +++1/2 The people who made The Philadelphia Experiment bought the wrong book (a supposedly factual account written by William L. Moore and Charles Berlitz) when they decided to turn this conspiracy theory into a film. So, instead, they (by way of Moore and Berlitz) simply ripped off a whopping chunk of the better choice -- this book, Thin Air. The echoes are so distinct in the first part of the book that to read it is to be constantly reminded of the film. But Thin Air came first, and it is superior to the film and its second-hand plagiarism. Fictionalizing the fiction, Simpson and Burger start with the so-called Philadelphia Experiment -- a Navy experiment in invisibility that actually worked, but which included painful and even fatal side-effects for the crew aboard the target vessel -- then expand it even further into the realm of science fiction by supposing that work on the project never ended. The story is built around a present-day Naval investigator, who is sucked into the case by an old girlfriend's husband's dreams of screaming men and a ship that disappears from one Navy yard only to briefly reappear in another. It's all plot (except for the de rigueur romance) -- plot and mystery (the first half), plot and action (the second). But it's fast-paced and well done, weakened only by an all-too-typical group of bad guys who turn out not to be nearly so clever or competent as their decades-long cover-up would reasonably indicate. On the other hand, Hammond, the Navy man, isn't James Bond, either, and that's refreshing. A smooth blend of suspense, science fiction, and even horror, with something as well for conspiracy and military buffs. + Fawcett may have published this book as The Prey, but author Smith apparently copyrighted it under the more descriptive title Prey of the Werewolves. Smith took the part of the readers, who know quite early on what the hero is up against. Fawcett took the hero's part, for he is a man of such brainless stupidity that we can't be entirely sure he figures it out himself until very near the end. He is Morivania, and he has sworn himself to kill the man who killed his father. It's a quest that takes him across a large swath of late eighteenth-century Europe (France particularly) and during which he accepts the help of various companions, including, for no apparent reason, a girl who narrowly escapes being burned as a witch and an old scientist who manages to fall in love with a female-shaped clockwork figure. At least the beautiful woman he picks up in Paris serves a need -- that is, when he isn't rutting with an irresistible wolf-woman. The companion he needs most of all, though, is a strange old fellow who not only knows a great deal about Morivania's enemy, but how to kill him, as well. When Morivania sees him enjoying being petted like a dog, he fails to make any connection. Yet he comes by his addled wits honestly: the book itself is appallingly unglued. Smith, for instance, sees no problem with spending over 400 pages setting up a confrontation that he whimsically resolves with the words, "Seconds later it was over." One imagines he felt justified in doing this because this isn't a story of rising action and climactic release; it's an episodic journey punctuated at every opportunity with action that serves no purpose other than to frighten Morivania -- he certainly never learns anything from it. The truth is, he can't learn much: Smith doesn't have much to tell. The big revelation has to do with the specific nature of the werewolves. They aren't men who turn into ravening beasts at the full moon (which we knew all along); they are more like the Hengist character in the original Star Trek episode "Wolf in the Fold." But, true to form, resolving that revelation is the work of a mere paragraph or two. In addition to Star Trek, Smith may also have been influenced by Guy Endore's classic The Werewolf of Paris. Endore used the Franco-Prussian War to illuminate human depravity. Smith similarly builds much of his story within the French Revolution. He, however, has no higher purpose than to generate excuses for ostensibly exciting, if absurdly immaterial, unrest. In sum, a useful reminder that not all literary drivel is self-published. ++++ The first suspense novel in Woolrich's "Black Series" is a cunningly conceived tale of revenge and rough justice. The opening quotation from Guy de Maupassant has us rooting for the murderess before we've even met her. Then we meet her, and she's so beautiful, so clever and efficient -- so deliciously dark -- that our admiration and affection for her grow, even as she takes out one seemingly average man after another. We trust her. Julie Bailey is one of the great women of suspense fiction, a woman who has only one thing for the five men who killed her husband and got away with it: a violent death. It all works so well because Woolrich takes the time to introduce us to each of the victims, while showing us how Julie gets close enough to them to make the killings personal. Superior noir, but not without a touch of levity: Woolrich closes out each section with the poor cop who's going nuts trying to figure out what's happening and why. Adapted for film in 1968 by French director François Truffaut. ++++ Physicist Lionel Barrett is the nominal leader of a small group of investigators hired by a dying man to investigate a supposedly haunted house in order to establish conclusively whether or not there is survival after death. Barrett doesn't think so; Florence Tanner, a mental medium, disagrees; and Ben Fisher, a physical medium and the only sane survivor of a previous investigation years before, agrees with Florence -- but he's there less to prove anything to his employer than to avenge his previous failure. Edith, Barrett's seemingly timid wife, is along for the ride. It's a wild ride, to be sure. This is not a book that skimps on its supernatural manifestations. Spirit guides, poltergeist activity, possession, teleplasmic extrusions -- the list goes on and on. You want action? You've found it. To Matheson's credit, it isn't, however, mindless mayhem. He doesn't toss a ghost in the house and figure anything goes. Matheson weaves together the personalities of his investigators with the sordid history of the house to create a believable framework for all the insanity. The final revelation -- a psychologically weak explanation for the house's most evil ghost -- can't spoil an otherwise satisfying resolution. Made into a film, The Legend of Hell House, in 1973. |
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