Book Review: The Twelve by Justin Cronin

The Twelve (The Passage #2)

Written by: Justin Cronin

Published: 2012

Synopsis: At the end of The Passage, the great viral plague had left a small group of survivors clinging to life amidst a world transformed into a nightmare. In the second volume of this epic trilogy, this same group of survivors, led by the mysterious, charismatic Amy, go on the attack, leading an insurrection against the virals: the first offensives of the Second Viral War.

To do this, they must infiltrate a dozen hives, each presided over by one of the original Twelve. Their secret weapon: Alicia, transformed at the end of book one into a half human, half viral—but whose side, in the end, is she really on? (Via Goodreads)

WARNING: WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR BOOK 1 - sorta
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I finished reading The Passage while I traveled around Europe last year, and I made a stop in every book store I found to try and find a copy of The Twelve to read on my flight home. Considering my excitement to read The Twelve, it's maybe a little surprising that it took me over 3 months to finish. But my problem (alongside my general reading block) was the same as the one I had when I read The Passage, 1. it's flipping long you guys and 2. the first half is so chaotic and disjointed that it takes awhile to get absorbed into. With that said, I understand why there is so much location and character switching at the start. In both books it sets up the action set pieces of the second half of the novel and it adds a lot of the emotional weight of the narrative, but it also makes it hard to read at a decent clip. My edition was around 700 pages, I think I spent 3 months reading the first 300 pages, and less than a week to read the final 400.

But the book itself, the book I loved. After finishing The Passage I was so excited to find out what would happen next to the rag tag group of youngsters who seem to succeed against all odds. Would they find and defeat the rest of the 12? Would they live happily ever after? Would they ever see the other members of their little community again? When I first began The Twelve I stumbled a bit because it jumps to 5 years later* and suddenly characters from the first book are dead or missing. And even though I read these two books essentially back to back, I still had to get out my copy of The Passage and see if I missed something. There's also a chapter about a completely separate group of people and I struggled to place that event in the book's timeline, only working it out when the event later becomes relevant to the narrative. So there was some rocky ground there, and if you've had a big gap between reading The Passage, it's probably a good idea to revisit the book (or the wikipedia page) before launching into this one.

Knowing that the book is the second in a trilogy also causes some issues because it does seem like some parts are stretched out and treading water waiting for the intense conclusion which is surely coming in book three. That's not entirely fair on the book because like I said, after the mid-way point this book actually takes off at a decent clip but there is something ... hesitant? ... about the story. Perhaps that's in comparison to the insanity of the first book or maybe Cronin wanted to focus more in setting up the characters and foundations so that the third book could take off from page one. I don't know entirely and I can't quite put my finger on it because it isn't like there aren't huge set pieces in this book, it just feels like it's holding back.

I know this has been pretty broad, but it's been so long since I finished the book and I'm actually a little foggy about the details. But I want to get back into blogging more regularly and I felt like getting this review out into the world was probably a good step in that direction. So sorry for the broad and vague review, trust me when I say at the end I really enjoyed the book even amidst the slow and rocky first half and hesitancy.

*Maybe? It's been awhile since I finished it now and I can't remember specifics. It's definitely a chunk of time anyway.

Movie Review: Annabelle (2014)

Annabelle

Released: 2014

Directed by: John R. Leonetti

Starring: Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Tony Amendola, Alfre Woodard

Synopsis: A couple begin to experience terrifying supernatural occurrences involving a vintage doll shortly after their home is invaded by satanic cultists.

*Spoilers ahead. Only read if you don't mind having major plot points revealed*



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This may come as a surprise to some of you, but I'm a bit of a fan of the horror genre.

I'm a fan of everything from the truly terrifying psychological horror to the Z-grade shlock or the ultra-generic slasher. Whether it's actually scary or a laugh out loud play on the genre I happily head along to every horror movie I can. In saying all of this, I do get disappointed when a horror film doesn't live up to its predecessor or the frights-a-second suggested in the trailer. Which was unfortunately the case with Annabelle, the spin-off/sequel of last year's breakaway hit The Conjuring. 

Annabelle, for those of you who haven't seen the trailers and posters, is a film about a possessed doll. It had a small cameo in The Conjuring to set up the backstory of Ed and Lorraine Warren as paranormal investigators. Like the Warrens, the story of Annabelle is based on events that happened in real life. Well... real in the sense that there is a doll named Annabelle locked behind a glass door at the Warren's home which supposedly has haunted multiple families.

The real life "evil" Annabelle (photo credit)

The "real" story of Annabelle is actually quite creepy. It's the kind of story that I love to read late at night when I'm surfing the web - dolls that seem to be shifting position, leaving threatening notes and strangling people in their sleep. It's also the story that the original segment in The Conjuring told - which leaves this movie with the complicated issue of trying to work out exactly how to tell a story that's already been told.

Their answer to this puzzle was an origin story. Rather than simply build on the mystery of an innocent figure turned nasty, they decided to take all of the magic out of it and give us a very by the book explanation. So by the book in fact, that I'm fairly sure it's the origin given to Chucky. In Annabelle we meet the Gordons, a young married couple who are expecting their first child. The movie takes place at the tail end of the 1960s, at the end of the age of innocence. As the Gordon's come home from a morning in church and watch the news they're blasted with information about cult groups, particularly Charles Manson and that vein of Satanist. Mia Gordon reminds her husband that he needs to start locking the front door because "it's a different world now". That night Mia stirs in her sleep and we see their neighbours bedroom light turn on. The husband/neighbour picks up a gun (or was it a bat?) and goes to investigate, while the wife jumps onto the phone. As Mia turns over in bed we see the husband back into the bedroom before BLAM he's killed, and as the killer moves to the wife the light switches off. This wakes Mia up properly and waking her husband John they go to investigate, Mia left on the front porch while John runs into the neighbours house and comes out soon after covered in blood. The tension picks up as Mia runs back into their house to call the cops and we see shadows moving in the babies room behind her. She hears a noise, investigates, and is stabbed in her womb. Her and her husband and their baby survive, but the two murderers are killed in their house, the woman dying with the doll Annabelle in her arms. Cue creepy doll antics.

So here is where I get into major spoiler territory (The above details all happen within the first 10 minutes of the film and are also in much of the trailer). There is a fascinating premise that could have guided this movie. In fact, there are so many hints of it in the script that I'm almost convinced it was the original narrative but was shot down by the studio. So I thought I'd write about the film that we get and the film that could have been because Tom and I literally spent 45 minutes discussing this and feeling completely let down.

Insidious and The Conjuring (two of James Wan's other films), take a lot of visual and narrative cues from seminal horror films from the 1960/70s. While this isn't technically a Wan film (however, he is signed on as a producer) this is absolutely the case for Annabelle as well. This time it is The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby that seem to have the heaviest influence, although more in terms of visuals than thematic cues - which is where my problems lie. Both The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby deal with shifts in social conscious. The world was changing. It wasn't a given that a woman would stay home with the children, they wanted careers and lives outside of the household. Religion was becoming less of a devout necessity and more something done out of routine. Scientific invention and medical discoveries were completely changing the way people thought and behaved and considered things. Not to mention cults and violence were happening in places that were previously believed to be safe and "out of bounds". In The Exorcist a great deal of the book (although less of the film) is the mother's conflict between psychological or medical explanations and a gut feeling that what was happening to her daughter wasn't right. The priest suffers the same struggle. Is it a demon possessing this 13 year old, or is that just a centuries old explanation for things we don't understand and can't control?

This movie sets up a very similar situation. There is a clear conflict in Annabelle between science and religion, the safety of the old world and the violence of the new. When John and Mia are in church they're playing thumb wars, rather than listening to the priest. John is a med student on the cusp of becoming a doctor and is presented early on as a voice of reason, injected rationalism and science into their conversations. Mia on the other hand is afraid. She worries about the cults she hears of on the news, she frets about their door being left unlocked, she worries that her child is being brought into a world of darkness and fear and violence. When the event with the cultists occurs her fear is dialled up to 11. Which is absolutely understandable as both she and her child were nearly killed. When they return home after a short stay in hospital Mia is relegated to her bed. She tries to sew and watch TV but she's antsy and there are these odd noises in the nursery that keep bothering her. She becomes obsessed with finding out details of the case, asking the detectives to help her understand why the cultists did what they did.

The biggest issue with Annabelle is a lack of conflict. This isn't a situation like Poltergeist where an entire family is against the external force, this is like Rosemary's Baby in that Mia is essentially alone in her fears and attempts to protect her family. Her husband is not an antagonist like in R.B but he also isn't really part of the story. He's in his first year of residency and as such can mostly be found at the hospital. Mia is essentially alone against Annabelle. However, in this sort of story you usually have external conflict. The doctor that prescribes medication instead of exorcism, the husband that thinks the wife or daughter is imagining things. In this film Mia keeps her fears to herself for most of the film, but when she reveals her fears first to her neighbour (who also happens to be a bookshop owner well versed in the paranormal) and then to her husband they don't contest her beliefs. They don't patronise her or agree with her to comfort her fears, they just straight out believe that when she says a demon is after their baby, that a demon is after their baby.

The things is, conflict would have been so easy. We've already set up that the husband is a rationalist and a man of science. We've shown that the wife was already nervous and then experienced a traumatic event that basically proved these fears right. When the wife starts to hear noises and constantly checks the front door is locked the husband could rationalise that she's still afraid from the experience. When a fire  nearly kills her, it could have been the combined trauma from the attack and her baby hormones that made her forget that she left the burners on. We, as an audience, know that she's being haunted. We see the door close by itself and see the burners turn themselves on and her ankle grabbed by something invisible which pulls her towards the fire. But to everyone in the film, it's completely explainable. Even at the end of the film when Mia is hounded by Annabelle and the demon, the final scene would have likely looked to the police like the scene of someone who had finally snapped after months of paranoia and fear.

A quick debriefing of the conclusion. After things escalate further throughout the movie and a priest is brought in (who simply attempts to remove the doll from the house) Mia is once again alone in the house with her child and the doll/demon. The baby vanishes and Mia runs around the apartment in terror, hearing her daughter crying but being unable to find her. In the nursery the walls and ceilings the words "Her soul" and "I want her soul" are scribbled with red crayon and the porcelain dolls that sat on shelves are now strewn across the room with their eyes gouged out. Mia grabs the Annabelle doll and starts to smash it against the crib and then throws it across the room. Suddenly the crying stops and we look to the Annabelle doll and see a baby lying still against a shelf instead. There is a gut-wrenching scene where Mia thinks that she killed her daughter and it was the most upsetting and terrifying moment of the entire film. She soon discovers it was another trick and that the only way to save her daughter is to sacrifice herself, by throwing herself out of the nursery window. She doesn't, her husband saves her and their daughter, but imagine for a second that she had. After a movie where the husband believes his wife is circling the drain mentally, haunted and incapacitated by the events that transpired 6 months earlier, he comes home to ambulances and police cars and the bodies of his dead wife and daughter. It looks like she snapped, maybe she truly believed she was acting against a demon and then killed her daughter in a psychosis. The movie could then end with the husband sitting at the dining table, his world utterly destroyed. And then we hear the creak of the rocking chair, the noise that haunted Mia for all those months, before going to black.

Or maybe there was no demon. Maybe the horror movie turns into a gripping psychological thriller about the damage of post-natal depression and psychosis at a time when we still didn't completely understand psychology and medicine but thought we did. This isn't a revelatory story, I'm definitely not reinventing the wheel. But if you are going to take massive visual hints from films that famously deal with issues of mental health, feminism, motherhood and science vs religion you should follow that through with your narrative. To have these markers throughout your film, to depict intense emotional and physical violence against a new mother with no thematic point - it's lazy and frustrating.

I may be happy watching any horror movie that hits the cinema but that doesn't mean I don't have a preference for meticulously plotted horror. Jump scares for the sake of jump scares may be fun in the cinema but when Mia tripped and fell onto her stomach while still pregnant I blanched. When Mia held the lifeless body of her daughter I held my breath. These moments were visceral and they were real. In this film they feel manipulative because they only have a tenuous link to the thematic motivations of the film, but if they were placed in a film that was actually about motherhood in this era? Damn it could be powerful. So that is why this film failed for me. Because it felt like the were on the precipice of something provoking and potentially great and they chose the easier route. And when you consider that both Insidious and The Conjuring were well-rounded horror it's even more disappointing that this one missed the mark.

The one positive that came out of seeing Annabelle is that I now have an intense desire to write a horror movie that checks all the boxes that this type of film avoids. So keep your eyes peeled, maybe you'll see my name on the big screen one of these days.

Audiobook Review: Psycho by Robert Bloch

Psycho

Written by: Robert Bloch

Published: 1959

Audiobook read by: Paul Michael Garcia

Synopsis: It was a dark and stormy night when Mary Crane glimpsed the unlit neon sign announcing the vacancy at the Bates motel. Exhausted, lost, and at the end of her rope, she was eager for a hot shower and a bed for the night. Her room was musty but clean and the plumbing worked. Norman Bates, the manager, seemed nice, if a little odd.


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“Mothers sometimes are overly possessive, but not all children allow themselves to be possessed.”

Psycho is without a doubt a fantastic film, it's one of the fantastic films. But it owes everything it is to Robert Bloch, because without the fantastic foundation he created with his book, the film would have nothing.

But with all that said and done, I never had a burning desire to read the book that started it all. I had always had it on my list of "one day in the future I'm sure I'll get a chance" books but I never searched it out at book sales or book stores or even gave it a thought when perusing the shelves at the library. That changed when I was mindlessly flipping around Audible looking for books to use my credit on. Psycho came up as a suggested book for me and at a meagre 5 hours (I was still a little burnt out from the 30+ hour epic that was The Goldfinch) it seemed like the perfect purchase.

Part of the problem, I expect, is that I knew the twist. I don't have a lot of issues with spoilers, it rarely stops me from enjoying something I read/watch, but the 'twist' in Psycho is so seminal (as is the shower murder to be honest) that I wasn't sure if reading it would actually add that much. I definitely think I would have liked the book more if I didn't know the twist (I'm dancing around it, but everyone knows about Norman Bates' predilections right?) because the final 15% of the book was harrowing enough for me, so I can only imagine how much people reading it when it originally came out must have been glued to the edges of their seats. But knowing or not knowing, this book is a brilliant little thriller. Well written, well paced, and (in the case of the audiobook) well read.

It's hard to avoid comparing the book with the film. For the most part I'd say the film does a brilliant job bringing Bloch's story to life, making only fairly minor changes. One point I do want to raise though is that Film Norman Bates and Book Norman Bates could not be more different. Well, psychotically they're the same, but visually not so much. In the film the dishy Anthony Perkins plays the role, while in the book Norman Bates is described as in his early 40s and overweight. Thanks to Ellie's review last year I know that this was an intentional shift made by Hitchcock but it got me to thinking of Carrie which had a similar shift from overweight and homely to thin and attractive (even if Sissy Spacek isn't exactly your traditional Hollywood beauty) for the leading character.  I don't know if I was more attuned to Carrie because it was a change that stuck out for me personally, but I feel like people seem less critical of the Psycho change than of the Carrie change in reviews and discussions on the film adaptation. Is it because Hollywood has a nasty habit of prettying up every female they can, or is it that we actually care less when they recast a male character as someone more handsome? This isn't a complaint of the book or the film, I think Anthony Perkins was brilliant as Bates, but it was a thought that popped into my head almost immediately and has been sloshing around in there for a week or two now. And now it is in yours.

Psycho is well worth a read, regardless of how well you know - or don't know - the film adaptation. It's a short, sharp thriller which teases out some interesting characters in such a short space of time. It also plays with some interesting ideas, touching on issues relating to familial relationships and obligations, magic and psychology to develop a horror story that has the potential to terrify because of the events (which are definitely more horrific than the film, surprisingly) but also because it so clearly and matter-of-factly lays out why the events of the novel happen.

So this is a pretty short and bland review, but it's always difficult to review books that a) everyone knows about, b)is a thriller with twists, and c) is an audiobook, because I just don't notice writing style nearly enough. So I'm going to sign off with a shrug and hope that you accept my "just read it, cos" as acceptable enough.

Book Review: The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan

The Strain

Written by: Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan

Published: 2009

Synopsis: A Boeing 777 arrives at JFK and is on its way across the tarmac, when it suddenly stops dead. All window shades are pulled down. All lights are out. All communication channels have gone quiet. Crews on the ground are lost for answers, but an alert goes out to the CDC. Dr. Ephraim "Eph" Goodweather, head of their Canary project, a rapid-response team that investigates biological threats, gets the call and boards the plane. What he finds makes his blood run cold.

In a pawnshop in Spanish Harlem, a former professor and survivor of the Holocaust named Abraham Setrakian knows something is happening. And he knows the time has come, that a war is brewing.

So begins a battle of mammoth proportions as the vampiric virus that has infected New York begins to spill out into the streets. Eph, who is joined by Setrakian and a motley crew of fighters, must now find a way to stop the contagion and save his city - a city that includes his wife and son - before it is too late.
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“for in the absence of God he had found Man. Man killing man, man helping man, both of them anonymous: the scourge and the blessing.”

After finishing NOS4R2 on our US/Canada trip Tom and I decided to give Guillermo Del Toro's vampire book a go. I've really loved some of Del Toro's films and he seems like the kind of guy who is really passionate about folklore or mythic creatures, but then likes to twist them into something new. This actually isn't his first attempt at the vampire genre, his film Cronos is an amazing representation of vampiric conventions and themes. It was also where his working relationship with Ron Pearlman began, who happens to be the narrator of this audiobook, and a big reason why we decided now was the right time to finally read this book.

In some ways The Strain is a very good book. It deftly weaves vampire lore (of the Stoker variety) with a more modern take, the vampire as disease/parasite. It nods to Stoker with its older vampire-hunter Setrakian (as loveable as Van Helsing, but more badass), head vampire coming to the "new world" over the ocean (this time via plane and known as Master, not Dracula), a few Renfield type characters and perhaps a Mina/Johnathan relationship (however at this stage I'm not sure if that's between Eph and his (ex) wife or his colleague Nora). The more modern elements take this from a traditional horror into thriller territory, with Eph and Nora - working for the CDC in a speciality team dedicated to unknown biological threats - fighting a losing battle to keep New York City from succumbing to the vampires.

Unlike the sexy vampires in Twilight, Anne Rice books and, to an extent, Dracula itself, Del Toro*'s vampires are hideous. Transformation doesn't simply give them a few pointy teeth and a thirst for blood, their body begins to change into something new. They feast on blood via a spike that erupts through their mouth. There are no delicate ladies left in bed drained of their blood. This is messy, wild and animalistic. The disease/parasite wants to spread, so once someone is turned they return to their home, to their loved ones, and turn them too. Aside from the Master, none of the vampires seem to retain any semblance of their earlier life or personality, they're simply handy chunks of meat the parasite requires to survive. They're like a combination of the xenomorphs in Alien, zombies and the vampires from 30 Days of Night.

“What you fought was a dead man, possessed by a disease.""What--like a pinche zombie?" "Think more along the lines of a man with a black cape. Fangs. Funny accent. Now take away the cape and fangs. The funny accent. Take away anything funny about it.”

The thriller side of the book, where Eph and Nora try to understand how a plane lands and subsequently "goes dark" killing everyone on board (bar 4 survivors) with no sign of cause of death, was pretty interesting. Knowing that the answer is 'vampire' takes some of the fun out of their meticulous attempts to understand something new and obscure, but I did really enjoy the more scientific approach to a sub-genre that is almost always driven by emotion instead. The scenes at the airport, the morgues and the science labs were some of the best in the book. Their slow steps towards discovering the mythical cause of their mystery, their confusion and hesitation over symptoms and evidence that make no sense in our rational, scientific world. Not to mention the struggle Eph and Nora have to go through to accept the prognosis of 'vampire' from Setrakian, even when their research, and eyes, shout out in agreement. Perhaps most interesting of all, and something I rarely think of when reading books of this kind, is the trouble Eph and Nora have in accepting that they need to kill the vampires. Setrakian, a survivor of the holocaust and the Master, grew up with stories of the vampires and encountered their destructive forces often. For Setrakian, severing the head of the vampires and burning the bodies is simply what must be done. But Eph and Nora have grown up thinking that vampires are just stories, even witnessing the transformation of a person into the vampire doesn't allow them to happily accept this as anything other than murder. They have to fight against their better judgements, while always wondering if they're actually doing what's right, wondering whether there is a better, more scientific method that they're missing.

But this is where we start to run into the problems. It felt very clear to me while reading/listening to this book, that Del Toro is a filmmaker. Writing a book and writing a screen treatment are very different things, and I imagine it takes a lot of work to get good at doing both. In a book you should be following the "show don't tell" rule, but when you're writing a treatment, something that's basically used as a blueprint for the film, you occasionally need to tell instead of just show, so that down the track you now what it is you're wanting, visually. There are a few occasions where far too much information is given by Del Toro and it would take me completely out of the moment. Sometimes it was far too much information about a character given at once, sometimes it was a far too detailed description of the gun (which would be perfect for film, where you need your prop department to know exactly what you want in the scene) and other times it was just feeding too much background information about something fairly obvious. For instance, Eph and Nora are part of the canary team. Their role is basically to go in and assess the risk before other CDC teams or the police get involved. I'd hazard that most people know about the use of canaries in mines to detect harmful gases, but even if people don't it isn't going to ruin the book if they pass over that little reference. What we get though, is a hefty paragraph about how the canaries were used in the mines and why Eph's team is named after them. They've just been called in to investigate a complete mystery, they're the first of the scene, they're doctors and scientists and they work for the CDC. Even if you don't know the canary link, their role is pretty clear. It just comes across as clumsy writing or, at other times, as padding -as though they were told the book had to be 100,000 words and nothing less would be accepted. It weighs an already over-long novel down and adds chunk to a narrative that should be sleek and stream-lined.

I don't know if listening to this book, as opposed to reading it, exacerbated the problems I found in the book. It's possible that if I'd just been reading it I would have glossed over the over-explained areas and wouldn't have had as much of an issue with them. Or perhaps without Ron Pearlman's narration - which was really quite fantastic - I would have sighed and given up reading it all together. Del Toro's take on the vampire is dark and brutal and gory, and I loved that. Positioning the story as a biological threat to New York, almost akin to 28 Days Later, was also a brilliant idea. There is a really fantastic book between the covers of The Strain, it's just hidden between extraneous plot and detailing and some awkward narration. A television adaptation is coming this year and I have a sneaking suspicion it'll actually be pretty great. The graphic novel adaptation has already fixed a lot of the structure problems and info dumps, so perhaps Del Toro simply needs the visual in order to make his ideas work.

*I'm not exactly sure what the partnership between Del Toro and Hogan was when writing the book, but I'm just using Del Toro instead of Del Toro and Hogan.

My Holiday Reads: A Bunch of Mini-Reviews (part 2)

Straining my brain to remember enough details for reviews turned out to be harder than I thought. Plus I'm lazy. Okay, maybe it was just the lazy thing that made me decide to split this post up. But I've taken two days and I'm ready to write a few more reviews. Aren't you lucky!

*NOS4R2 by Joe Hill*

(audiobook)

Tom and I listened to the audiobook edition of this book on our way between LA, San Fran and New York. We'd finish up our nights with 30-60 minutes of Kate Mulgrew navigating this story of Christmas, mysterious pathways, broken lives and familial love. I have a physical copy of this book which I'm going to read and review at some point this year, so I'm going to keep this short and mainly focus on the audiobook experience. I really liked Kate Mulgrew as the narrator. I may be a little biased since I know her as Captain Janeway from Star Trek Voyager and Red in OiTNB and love her in those roles but I do think the voices she used for the central cast were excellent. Her Charlie Manx was breathy and sinister, Vic was broken and desperate but strong, Maggie is scared but brave simultaneously, and Bing/The Gasmask Man was thick-headed and aggressive. She absolutely brought the characters to life, which more than made up for the few smaller characters that she butchered the accents of, like poor Dr Patel who must have taken a hit to the head because he swayed between Indian and Irish every other sentence. But seriously, if the size of the book is daunting you maybe give this audiobook a shot.

*The Circle by Dave Eggers* 

Of all of these books I'm reviewing this is probably the one I wish I could review full length, because it was amazing. Unfortunately I took zero notes so it'd probably end up a pretty vague review. I had never read any Dave Eggers before, I think I'd dismissed him as being too art-literature and not something I would enjoy, but I completely misjudged him. This book is terrifying, absolutely captivating but terrifying. It really effectively examines the modern obsession with technology and the influential role some tech brands have on the way we live our lives. There were some bits that were a little sloppy or obvious (such as the identity of the mysterious young man) but the overall affect of the book is so intense and creepy that they were teeny blips on the whole.

For an alternate (and hilarious) review for The Circle click through this link.

*We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson*

I've been meaning to read some of Shirley Jackson's stories since everyone seemed to read The Haunting of Hill House last year, and even though I bought a bunch of digital editions I never got around to reading them. I was flipping through my Kindle one night when I couldn't sleep and something about this title drew me in. I clicked on it and didn't click out until I had finished it. That may sound more impressive than it actually is since this is it's only a novella (160 pages), but I still found it completely un-putdownable. It's a story about two sisters and their uncle who live in a grand house but keep completely to themselves. Why? Because several years earlier most of the family died of arsenic poisoning and even though eldest sister Constance was acquitted of murder the town doesn't trust them one bit. They may keep to themselves but they are completely content with their solitary lives. The younger sister Merricat, who narrates the story, protects the house and the family with talismans and magical charms, Constance has a green thumb that keeps the family fed and happy and uncle Julian, alive but damaged by the arsenic poisoning, relives that day constantly but is beloved by the sisters. The arrival of a cousin, Charles, shifts the family dynamic into chaos and Merricat struggles to right the status quo that they strove so hard to find. This is a gorgeous novella, the writing is beautiful and Merricat is a fascinating, if completely unreliable, narrator. 

*Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman*

(BBC radio-play)

I honestly have no idea if this audio version is even remotely like the actual book (Goodreads suggests...maybe?) but when it advertises a cast of Benedict Cumberbatch, Anthony Head, Natalie Dormer and Christopher Lee what am I supposed to do? Not buy it? Not likely. Regardless of whether the actual story is the same, the setting is the one and the same in both. Underneath London there exists another London, London Below, and this darker London is full of angels and monsters and secret doorways and marketplaces. The radio-play is purely dialogue with absolutely no narration, which does make it difficult to follow the action at times and given it is so short (approximately 3 hours) the pacing does feel off at times. I imagine if it is telling the same story ( in this story normal Londoner Richard Mayhew helps a young lady which leads him to an adventure with her and some others in London Below) there are some details missing that link sections or develop characters and add to that slightly off-kilter feel. But seriously, James McEvoy, Sophie Okonedo, Romola Garai and CHRISTOPHER LEE. Who cares if it's not perfect with a cast that perfect?

Wrapping up RIP VIII

I hadn't planned to do a wrapping up post for RIP VIII but when I saw them popping up all over the place I figured I might as well document how I went. I had a lot of fun with this challenge, it was nice and low key thanks to it being over two months instead of one. I was a little worried I'd get sick of reading horror/dark fiction constantly but I managed to include some non-RIP reading which I think was probably a good idea. I wasn't so great at the blog-hopping aspect. If I already follow you then I saw and read your posts, but I probably only visited a couple new-to-me blogs which is a little shameful, but oh well!

I ended up reading 6 books for RIP VIII and I liked them all, so woooo success! Of the books, Coraline was probably my favourite but I was also pleasantly surprised with how much I liked Warm Bodies. I don't think I'll bother with mini-reviews for these ones since I wrote full reviews for each, but if you want to see what I read and what I thought then follow the links.

The Pilo Family Circus - Will Elliott
Shadow and Bone - Leigh Bardugo
Warm Bodies - Isaac Marion
Coraline - Neil Gaiman
Skeleton Crew - Stephen King
Rape: A Love Story - Joyce Carol Oates

I guess maybe Skeleton Crew should be in this section since it's a book of short stories *shrugs* Anyway, I read way more short stories than I expected to, and it seems a little silly to pat myself on the back for reading short stories since their defining feature is that they're SHORT, but I really don't read too many of these guys so I'm going to pat myself on the back anyway. Anywho, my favourite was probably In the Tall Grass, but I liked all three. Sleepy Hollow wasn't really what I was expecting at all, way less horror than I anticipated but it's a really well written narrative. And UR was a lot of fun, although the Kindle stuff was a little blechh. Links and such below.

UR - Stephen King (short story)
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving (short story)
In the Tall Grass - Stephen King and Joe Hill (short story)

I didn't get around to writing any reviews for this part of the challenge, but I did watch 3 films that were mostly really good. It's a little too late for them to be Halloween watches now, but who says you can only watch horror on Halloween? I watched Sleepaway Camp, Poltergeist and Chernobyl Diaries and I'm going to write a little mini-review of each because that way I don't feel like I'm cheating by including them in the challenge.

Sleepaway Camp (1983). This film is ridic. It is the horror equivalent of The Room, it's poorly acted, poorly shot, poorly written and not at all scary. But it is HILARIOUS in how bad it is. From the clown-like mother figure, the Brechtian memory scenes, to the cropped shirts and tiny shorts (on hairy dudes) and absurd murders - this film will have you agape at how terribly awesome it is. It might sound terrible, but it's worth it for the ending. The ending is the most phenomenally insane thing I have ever seen and you need to watch the whole film to truly appreciate it. Definitely save this for a group movie night if you can, it's so much better with a lot of people. And it's on Youtube in its entirety, so you don't even have to worry about paying for this dreck!

Poltergeist (1982). Some movies are classics for a reason. This film is SO good. I am horrified that I had never seen it before, I've wasted so many good rewatch years! Some of the effects towards the end are a little hackey by modern standards, but the creative measures they used to try and depict and poltergeist-ridden house are really pretty fantastic and don't detract from the story at all. It's not a scary-scary film, but there's that perfect '80s mix of supernatural horror and comedy which makes up for the lack of pulse-raising spookery. Also, there's a clown doll. A CLOWN DOLL. That's 2 awful creepy things mixed together!

Chernobyl Diaries (2012). A friend bought this for Tom and I last Christmas, and we only just got around to watching it. It was fine, I mean it's nothing special, don't go and run out looking for it, but if it's on TV...maybe don't switch over right away. There are some really effective jump scares, but they don't happen until way too late in the film. Who wants to spend 40 minutes watching a bunch of 20 year old backpackers drink in the Ukraine and then sneak into Pripyat to check out the irradiated abandoned town? Not this lady, or at least, not this lady UNLESS they die gruesome deaths instantly. Oh oh oh, does everyone remember Jesse McCartney, the blonde singer from a decade ago who had like 3 songs? Yeah he's in this.

Top 10 Tuesday: Best Halloween Reads

Top 10 Tuesday is hosted by the fancy folk at The Broke and The Bookish

I had a lot of trouble narrowing this list down from 10,000 to 10. I thought about making it a least to most scary reads list, but ended up struggling with that since I gravitate to the scariest books possible. What I landed on though was 10 books which encompass various levels of scariness and focus on different nightmarish topics, and all are favourite reads of mine. There are vampires (3 actually), good vs evil epics, exorcisms, nihilistic dystopians, creative graphic novels, and violet-eyed witches. They're all fantastic well-written, well constructed and edge-of-your-seat reads. Some will break your heart, others will make you reevaluate your beliefs, and all will demand your full attention. Happy Halloween reading!

I Am Legend - Richard Matheson

The Stand - Stephen King

The Exorcist - William Peter Blatty

Let the Right One In - John Ajvide Lindqvist

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Dracula - Bram Stoker

The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman

Locke and Key - Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez (graphic novel series)

Misery - Stephen King

The Witches - Roald Dahl

Monday Links

*20 books that are almost impossible to adapt - except that a bunch of them have been adapted and adapted successfully, but whatevs (Via Buzzfeed)

*David Sedaris wrote this essay about his younger sister's suicide and it's a really great aching read. (Via The New Yorker)

*Just in time for Halloween, here are 20 awesome horror flicks you can stream online for free. Definitely watch The Orphanage, such an amazing film, but if you're after silly B-grade horror you can't go past Sleepaway Camp, you have to see it to believe it. (Via Flavorwire)

*We all agree that Twin Peaks is amazing right? Well Mental Floss have a great article about how it transformed the soap opera into high art. (Via Mental Floss)

*I love when people re-imagine Disney princesses as something else, so I especially love this adaptation which imagines them as pop culture heroines! Aerial as Black Wids might be the greatest thing I've seen. (Via Buzzfeed)

Short story Reviews: UR by Stephen King, In the Tall Grass by Stephen King and Joe Hill, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

A few months ago I read Stephen King and Joe Hill's short story In the Tall Grass and had no idea how to review it. Short stories are always hard to review, because there isn't a lot to discuss without giving away some of the critical elements, but they usually (or the ones I read anyway) come in an anthology so you can bluff your way through by writing a couple of lines or paragraphs about each story and make up a full review that way. This was a singular story, something I found when I was searching the Stephen King tag on Amazon, and I just couldn't review it in any way that seemed worth it. Lucky for me RIP VIII came along and gave me the perfect platform to write about it and a couple of other short stories I'd been considering reading. So here you go, reviews to In the Tall Grass, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and UR.

Advertisement:  "I use Grammarly to correct grammar because 'ain't nobody got time for that*' 
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In the Tall Grass

Written by: Joe Hill and Stephen King

Published: 2012

Synopsis: In the Tall Grass begins with a sister and brother who pull off to the side of the road after hearing a young boy crying for help from beyond the tall grass. Within minutes they are disoriented, in deeper than seems possible, and they’ve lost one another. The boy’s cries are more and more desperate.

My thoughts: About a year ago I read a comic based on a Joe Hill and Stephen King novella titled Throttle. I really enjoyed seeing their different styles clash and meld, so when I came across this short story I snapped it up immediately.

I really love Stephen King's short stories. I think it's because they tend to be really experimental, either he's playing around with ideas that will later become full time novels or they're something so completely different to what I'm used to from him. At the time of reading this short story, the only Joe Hill I'd read was his comic series Locke and Key (which is a MUST read) and I had loved how much Joe seemed to pay homage to his father while never seeming like he was simply riding that wave of nepotism and fame (his obvious talent also helps immensely).

This story is very short and very quick. Brother and sister duo Becky and Cal DeMuth are driving through Kansas when they hear someone calling for help. They park on the side of a road near a church and look into the field of tall, tall grass and hear a child and his terrified mother calling out. Once they make their way in though, they get lost and no matter how hard they try, they can't get their bearings back.

The premise is all King. It's a quiet story, one that teeters on that thin line between panic and supernatural. Is the grass actually working against them, hiding a killer who is coming to get them? Or are they just overtaken by their own fears of getting lost and it seems like everything is working against them? Joe Hill, I would guess, brings the darker and more gruesome elements. It's not that King often shies away from these sorts of details, but it was, for want of a better phrase, more in your face than he typically writes. The blend of the quiet with the aggressive, the subtle with the dark makes for something of a schizophrenic narrative. It never felt like two people passing the keyboard from one to another as they wrote the story, but if you're as familiar with King as I am, the influence of his son is instantly recognisable. And I loved it.

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The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Written by: Washington Irving

Published: 1820

Synopsis: Sleepy Hollow is a strange little place...some say bewitched. Some talk of its haunted valleys and streams, the ghostly woman in white, eerie midnight shrieks and howls, but most of all they talk of the Headless Horseman. A huge, shadowy soldier who rides headless through the night, terrifying unlucky travellers.

Schoolteacher Ichabod Crane is fascinated by these stories....Until late one night, walking home through Wiley's swamp, he finds that maybe they're not just stories.

My thoughts: I decided to pick up this novella when I watched the first episode of the new TV series Sleepy Hollow. As I watched it I was like "wait, wait, wait, the headless horseman was one of the four horses of the apocalypse?" and "Ichabod's wife was a witch, I didn't think he even had a wife" and I realised that while I know a bit about the Washington Irving story, I didn't know enough (and what I do know maybe came from the Johnny Depp film). I really enjoyed this read, although I'm a little embarrassed to say it took me awhile to get back into the rhythm of pre-20th century writing. There are so many adjectives and lengthy descriptions about absolutely everything, that tree over there, the school hall, the shape of Ichabod's face and when it's been as long between classic texts as it has been for me it's hard not to just be like "why Washington WHY". But once I fell back into the style, I enjoyed the hell out of it, even though it was nothing like I thought it would be.

Ichabod Crane is not the delightfully weird fellow I expected him to be. He's actually kind of despicable, not a bad guy per say, but he's hardly the person you root for in a love triangle. His "love" is basically motivated by Katrina Van Tassel's father's wealth and standing in Sleepy Hollow, which is made beautifully aware in a scene where Ichabod imagines all the farm animals as tasty meals that Katrina would cook him. The entire story seems to have been written by Washington with his tongue pressed firmly in his cheek, so while quotes like;

"Spare the rod and spoil the child - Ichabod Crane's scholars certainly were not spoiled"

and;

"Balt Van Tassel was an easy indulgent soul; he loved his daughter better even than his pipe"

Are a little "oh right, 1820 was really different," they're also kind of hilarious.

But It's the descriptions that Washington Irving writes about Mr Crane, or the town of Sleepy Hollow and the town's penchant for supernatural goings-on that really makes this story worth reading. They do border on the laborious from time to time, but the people are so wonderfully drawn and the setting so gorgeously painted that it's easy to motivate yourself to keep going past the bits that drag. I mean, tell me this isn't a wonderful description of Ichabod;

"...for he was a huge feeder, and though lank, had the dilating powers of an anaconda" 

See, it's great. So come for the ghost story about a headless horseman and a stuck up school teacher and stay for the gorgeous descriptions. And then recommend other Washington Irving stories to me, because I want more.

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UR

Written by: Stephen King

Published: 2009

Synopsis: Following a nasty break-up, lovelorn college English instructor Wesley Smith can't seem to get his ex-girlfriend's parting shot out of his head: "Why can't you just read off the computer like the rest of us?" Egged on by her question and piqued by a student's suggestion, Wesley places an order for Amazon.com's Kindle eReader. The [pink?] device that arrives in a box stamped with the smile logo -via one-day delivery that he hadn't requested - unlocks a literary world that even the most avid of book lovers could never imagine. But once the door is open, there are those things that one hopes we'll never read or live through.

My Thoughts: This was a spontaneous purchase on my phone's kindle app when I was waiting for the bus and had nothing else to read. It was, if wikipedia is correct, a short story King wrote exclusively for sale for Kindle, and that really shows. It hovers somewhere between being a long ad for Kindle and a cute little way of tying an exclusive deal into the narrative. When lines like "Wesley went to the Kindle shop and bought X" comes up a gazillion times I started to wonder if Amazon had written into the contract a minimum of references that needed to be in the story, and considering the whole story hinges on the Kindle, it grew a little tiring. If you've read Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore it sort of felt like the Google references which almost overshadowed the story by the end. But all that aside, it was still an enjoyable little short story.

Basically, the kindle that Wesley buys to spite his sports coach ex-girlfriend -they broke up after a fight where he called her illiterate (oof) and she said he was out of touch with the world - turns out not to be a real kindle. It has the regular buy and read functions, but it's also pink and has some experimental functions. These functions allow him to search the multiverse for books that his favourite authors may have written elsewhere, and with a student and co-worker, Wesley spends a long night exploring the works of Hemingway, Shakespeare etc that don't exist in his particular world. While the three men have an uncomfortable feeling that they're peeking through a doorway they shouldn't, it mostly just seems like a harmless - albeit addictive - activity. However, things shift suddenly when Wesley explores other UR functions, one of which allows him to read news headlines from the future. It's here that Wesley finds out that Ellen, his ex, and her busload of college girls are going to die when a drunk driver runs them off the road. Wesley's faced with the decision, does he act on this knowledge and try and save his ex (who he still loves) and break the paradox laws, or does he respect those laws and let his girlfriend and a group of students die?

The story isn't particularly tense or scary, but it is fun and there are a couple of neat references to other King books (primarily Dark Tower references, because duh). There's a few interesting looks at the physical vs digital debate that take place during one of Wesley's class, and it's refreshing to have the students be like "who cares if it has binding, books are about ideas and emotions" rather than the typical garbage about us Millennials** only liking digital whatevers. So if you're a fan of King or looking for a fun short story about books that don't exist (but we wish did) then this could be for you. Also, if you're one of the The Corrections readalongers, Wesley is like a breath of fresh air compared to Chip's pretentious teaching style, so have at.

*I may have had this meme stuck in my head when writing this post.

**When did Millennials become a thing btw? What happened with being Gen Y?

Book Review: Skeleton Crew by Stephen King

Skeleton Crew

Written by: Stephen King

Published: 1985

Synopsis: In a bumper collection of tales guaranteed to chill the spine and freeze the blood, we meet GRAMMA - who only wanted to hug little George, even after she was dead; THE RAFT - a primeval sea creature with an insatiable appetite; THE MONKEY - an innocent-looking toy with sinister powers; the unspeakable horror of THE MIST. And there is a grusome host of other stories, each with th distinctive blend of unimaginable terror and realism that typifies King's writing.

Challenges: RIP VIII

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“Grab onto my arm now. Hold tight. We are going into a number of dark places, but I think I know the way. Just don't let go of my arm. And if I should kiss you in the dark, it's no big deal; it's only because you are my love.”

When it comes to Stephen King I'm pretty well-read*, but I'm not sure if I can say the same when it comes to his short story collections. I've reviewed two (Full Dark, No Stars and Night Shift) but I honestly can't remember if I read any in my pre-blog days. The silly thing is, I LOVE King's short stories, and in some cases I actually love them more than his full length books. King might be known for his horror, but the beauty of his short story collections are their eclectic mash of sci-fi, horror, family drama, fantasy, hard-boiled crime and nostalgic love story. I love finishing a story about a mysterious fog that seems to be hiding all kinds of prehistoric or inter-dimensional monsters and embarking on a bitter-sweet story of a man's love for a woman and that woman's love for finding short cuts. I guess some people would find this jarring, but I really enjoy seeing Stephen King's skill demonstrated in 20+ different stories that he wrote at different times in his life. I love to see him wrangle a supernatural sub-genre he hasn't tried before, or wrestle with his own addictions or express his love for his wife in abstract stories. They don't all work, but that's the luck of the draw with short story collections. You win some, and lose others.

Skeleton Crew is made up of 22 stories of varying lengths. The longest is The Mist, a novella 150-ish pages long, while Paranoid: A Chant is probably the shortest at a teensy 5 pages. But the majority of them probably hover around the 15 to 30 page length. Not every short story collection has an overarching theme, and considering this collection is made up of stories he'd had published in magazines at various stages in his career (from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s) perhaps it was silly of me to try and find one here. But as I read I couldn't help but notice how prominent relationships were in every story. Relationships between father and son, broken relationships that left people feeling hurt and abandoned, strained relationships between daughter and sick mother. But it wasn't simply a repetition of relationships that I noticed, each story seemed to be bathed in a nostalgic light, a mourning for relationships that were or could have been, for a childhood that had been bright and happy before shuddering to an end with the death of a parent. Some of the stories did take place in the future, with a narrator recalling the events of the narrative, but even the ones that took place in the present tense - this nostalgia or sadness for what was or couldn't be again lingered on.

I took a month to read Skeleton Crew, and broke it up with plenty of other books, and I think that this was the best way to approach it. Sometimes reading short stories feels like a chore, liking one doesn't mean you'll love the next, and sometimes you just want a narrative you know you're going to like from start to finish. But I've been warming to short stories more and more over the past few years and I've decided that I agree wholeheartedly with King that;

“a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.”

But since I took so long to read it, my memory is a little fuzzy of some of the earlier stories and my notes don't make complete sense to me anymore (let alone trying to decipher my shocking handwriting). So I'll just write up about a couple of the ones that I liked the most and are clearest in my memory.

The Mist
I really loved this novella. I saw the film adaptation a few months ago and I've come to the conclusion that films should only be adapted from short stories. The film was so close to the book, and because the story is just over 150 pages there was no need to crop out anything that was extraneous to the A-story. The one thing they did change though was the ending, and while I liked the ambiguous ending of the short story, I actually dug the hell out of the film's ending - it was so bleak and unflinching and even King has admitted it's perhaps a better conclusion. Regardless of the ending, I loved the subtle nod to Lovecraft with the tentacled inter-dimensional monsters and the whole story -which spans about 3 days in total - was infused with so much claustrophobic tension and memorable characters.

The Jaunt
This story is a really interesting - and really fantastic - sci-fi short story. Mark Oates and his family are heading up to Jupiter for his new job, and are using the teleportation "Jaunt" technology which leaves from a very bland bus-terminal waiting room. In order to stop his kids from panicking, he tells them how the Jaunt was invented and it's brief history, hoping that armed with knowledge they'll be much calmer when their turn comes around. It's a really clever narrative device to deliver the hard science fiction, and the ending... Dude, the ending is GREAT.

Mrs. Todd's Shortcut
This story took awhile for me to get into, but it was perhaps the first where that feeling of nostalgia really hooked into me. It's slow to build but there's a haunting quality to the writing which kept me interested even when I thought that maybe I should just skip it.

“I sit on the bench in front of Bell's Market and think about Homer Buckland and about the beautiful girl who leaned over to open his door when he come down that path with the full red gasoline can in his right hand - she looked like a girl of no more than sixteen, a girl on her learner's permit, and her beauty was terrible, but I believe it would no longer kill the man it turned itself on; for a moment her eyes lit on me, I was not killed, although a part of me died at her feet." 

Word Processor of the Gods
This was a fun little story about a man who is unhappy with his lot in life. He doesn't like his wife, his son or his career (he's still waiting to write the book that'll make him a millionaire) and he detests that his brother has everything he wants. So when the gift his recently-dead nephew had planned to give him is passed to him, and it turns out to be a word processor (Frankenstein'ed from a bunch of electrical junk) that has the power to delete and rewrite life, he does exactly that. It's a bit silly, and when you think about what he does it's a little sociopathic, but I liked it all the same.

Survivor Type
I didn't love the way this story was written, but the narrative was interesting enough to make up for that. A doctor-turned-drug-smuggler washes up on a desert island when the boat he was on goes down, and with no natural vegetation and very little living animals, the doctor turns to the only meat he has readily available. it was fascinating to read the disintegration of his rationality as time and hunger picked away at it. It gets a little gross, but nothing too graphic.

Gramma
NOPE. I don't even think I can talk about this one. I had heard it was terrifying so I went and sat outside in the bright midday sun next to a pretty creek with plenty of people walking their dogs around me and even then my hair stood up in fright! Poor little George is stuck at home with his ailing bedridden grandmother while his mum and brother head to the hospital. What begins with the active imagination of an 8 year old devolves into a terrifying story about witches and the Necronomicon** and a grandmother that wants to hug her grandson. *shudders*

There weren't really any stories in this collection I didn't like, although I did struggle a little with The Reach, Beachworld, and Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1). They weren't bad in any sense of the word, but they just weren't for me. But who knows, perhaps you'll hate the stories I loved and desperately love the stories that I couldn't connect with. You know, I often wonder if Stephen King short stories are more for well versed King fans than King neophytes, but I think this might be a collection I'd recommend for both.



*Not Laura well-read, but that's a given.

**I really love when Lovecraftian mythos is incorporated without direct reference to it. Stephen King, Joe Hill and Neil Gaiman do this a lot, and I really appreciate how well they do it without jumping around with signs saying "CTHULU WAS HERE". All you need is a neatly place "Hastur degryon Yos-soth-oth" and you're immediately taken into Lovecraft's world.

Book Review: Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

Warm Bodies

Written by: Isaac Marion

Published: 2010

Synopsis: 'R' is a zombie. He has no name, no memories and no pulse, but he has dreams. He is a little different from his fellow Dead.

Amongst the ruins of an abandoned city, R meets a girl. Her name is Julie and she is the opposite of everything he knows - warm and bright and very much alive, she is a blast of colour in a dreary grey landscape. For reasons he can't understand, R chooses to save Julie instead of eating her, and a tense yet strangely tender relationship begins.

This has never happened before. It breaks the rules and defies logic, but R is no longer content with life in the grave. He wants to breathe again, he wants to live, and Julie wants to help him. But their grim, rotting world won't be changed without a fight...

Challenges: RIP VIII
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"Once you've arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters what route you took"

So it seems like 2013 is the year of YA reads. It's also the year of swallowing my pride and admitting maybe I was a little quick to judge. When I first heard rumblings of Warm Bodies online a year or so ago, I grumbled to myself about zombies finally being given the Twilight treatment. When favourable reviews started to come out I attributed it to people not really knowing the zombie genre too well, and therefore having pretty minimal expectations. In fact, I just went back to Alley's review (which is brilliant by the way, go read it and give her some love) and I commented saying:

I have this on my 'to read' list but it's definitely going to be a library book, because I still feel like it's going to be a universal joke to make me read a zombie Twilight story.

I was ready to write this one off without giving it a real chance. And considering I've been studying zombies for the past 2.5 years and have been burnt by shitty representations of zombies in literature in the past - I think I had a right to be a little wary. But when my PhD supervisor told me the film was actually pretty brilliant I had to reconsider my stance, because if Australia's best known and respected horror expert thinks it's a nifty take on the genre then maybe there's something to it. He was right, you all were, and I was very, very wrong. Warm Bodies is everything everyone said it was, it was funny and clever and a really solid YA read. It wasn't perfect, and I'll get to that later, but i'm definitely glad everyone wore me down and it was sitting on the "HEY! Read this immediately" shelf at the library.

So a lot of the reviews I've read have said "this isn't like any zombie story you've ever seen before" and that isn't entirely correct. Isaac Marion, who surely must be a pretty big fan of the genre, actually builds on the work of George A Romero. Romero's best known for the first two of his six zombie films, but if you follow the two trilogies there's a clear evolutionary path that the zombie takes. From mindless cannibalism and the reckless spread of their virus (Night of the Living Dead), the zombies slowly start to show recognition of household items (Bub and the telephone in Day of the Dead), to organised attacks against human oppressors (Big Daddy in Land of the Dead), to choosing to eat animals over humans (Survival of the Living Dead). What is new, however, is taking this idea and showing it to us from the zombie point of view. Whether Marion actually intended to build on Romero's work is up for debate (I can't honestly be bothered to see if he's said anything to this effect in an interview), it's clear he needed to take this approach to make the story work, because a story from a traditional zombie's point of view would be terribly boring. But Marion manages the difficult task of balancing this idea of consciousness with well-known zombie conventions. It's true that they think and maintain relationships and families, but they do still attack and eat the living, rot and decompose and can be taken out completely by a blow to the brain. It advances and adapts the genre without slapping die-hard fans in the face - something that Stephenie Meyer never managed to get a hang of.

I intend to throw Twilight under the bus A LOT more

I'm sure you've all heard the basic breakdown of the story, but here's a refresher just in case. Warm Bodies is based on Romeo and Juliet, although beyond the forbidden love angle and a scene on a balcony, it's a pretty loose adaptation. Did it actually need to be based on one of Shakespeare's most famous plays? No, but unlike Twilight it's not just a ham-fisted shout-out screaming "LOOK IT'S JUST LIKE GREAT LITERATURE". Romeo, or R in this case since he can't remember the rest of his name, is different to the other zombies. He seems to have retained more of his humanity and is constantly battling with the existential crisis that is life as a zombie. He goes through the motions, he kills and eats the living, "marries" another zombie and adopts a couple of kids,  rides an escalator around and around - but it never seems like enough. And then one day on a hunt he finds himself drawn to protecting a human, a girl named Julie. He covers her in blood, pretends he turned her into one of them, and takes her back to his home in an aeroplane.

And this is where my favourite part of the novel comes in. The reason R falls for Julie is that he eats her boyfriend. And in Marion's world, when a zombie eats a brain they get a brief flash of the life that their victim lived. Some flashes are stronger than others, and R seems to live (ha! sorry not sorry) for these brief reminders of life. So when he takes a bite of Perry's grey matter he experiences a flash far greater than he's ever experienced, and Perry's love of Julie is passed on to R. It's this initial flash of life and emotion that leads to the development of our two leads' relationship and the unfolding of the narrative. R becomes almost addicted to revisiting Perry's life (he keeps the rest of his brain in his pocket for snacks) and eventually it develops into something...more. And the small flashes of Perry's life and his struggle to find a reason to live in a post-everything, zombie-infested world were brilliant. It's not that R and Julie were bad characters per say, but they are both cut from well-worn YA cloth and didn't really deliver anything new. Perry on the other hand felt more human and less like an archetype, and I shared R's curiosity in unfolding the story of his life.

The zombie life mirrors the life of the living in Warm Bodies. Both groups have banded together into larger groups for protection, they train their young to survive in this apocalyptic world, and they struggle to retain a semblence of pre-zombie normality. There's not a lot of cheer and optimism in the living camps, but there's even less in the zombie hives. They live in groups, but given their inability to truly communicate or physically respond, they're always alone.

"We recognise civilisation - buildings, cars, a general overview -but we have no personal role in it. No history"

Their hunger isn't something they have any control over, and R isn't the only one who seems to detest what they've become. All of their attempts at living life, their marriages, attempts to have sex and fascination with eating brains are so sad and empty that it's hard not to feel sympathy for these people who were once us. And Marion manages to weave these small moments of levity into the greater romance plot in such a way that it never feels overly sad or philosophical, but it's impossible to completely ignore them.

Mild spoilers - Although I liked the book overall, I actually didn't love the central premise, namely that through meeting Julie R begins to transform. The execution felt a little rushed and it was a little overwrought and under-explained. I think it could have been a fascinating book if they had to learn to love and live with each other despite their differences, differences which are impossible to ignore. I understand that Marion is writing a sequel which perhaps will explore the cause of his transformation and the ramifications, and certain hints regarding the boneys give a cursory explanation but I wanted more about the how and why and less about the R&J love story. But then I'm pretty stone-hearted when it comes to YA romance stories. End spoilers.

I don't particularly like being wrong, but when it comes to a book exceeding expectations I'll happily accept it. Warm Bodies is a funny and sweet novel that I'm starting to think might actually be my new favourite zombie novel. And in case you're nervous about it being scary (it isn't) because zombies are always scary (seriously it isn't scary) you can actually read the short story that this was based on, which will 100% prove to you that I'm not lying about it being non-scary.

Book Review: The Pilo Family Circus by Will Elliott

The Pilo Family Circus 

Written by: Will Elliott

Published: 2009

Synopsis: "You have two days to pass your audition. You better pass it, feller. You’re joining the circus. Ain’t that the best news you ever got?” Delivered by a trio of psychotic clowns, this ultimatum plunges Jamie into the horrific alternate universe that is the centuries-old Pilo Family Circus, a borderline world between Hell and Earth from which humankind’s greatest tragedies have been perpetrated. Yet in this place—peopled by the gruesome, grotesque, and monstrous—where violence and savagery are the norm, Jamie finds that his worst enemy is himself. When he applies the white face paint, he is transformed into JJ, the most vicious clown of all. And JJ wants Jamie dead!

Challenges:  RIP VIII
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“The classic definition of slapstick runs along the line of, "Funny is someone else ramming his face repeatedly into a brick wall.”

When I decided to take part in RIP VIII I knew it was the perfect opportunity to finally read The Pilo Family Circus. Tom had bought it a few years ago and had raved about it, but for whatever reason it continued to sit unread on my shelf. Maybe it was the clowns thing, for some strange reason I've always found clowns terrifying.

Oh right, that's why.

So anyway, when RIP VIII was announced I immediately started this book so that I couldn't pass over it yet again. And while I liked it, I didn't like it for the reasons I thought I'd like it and it wasn't nearly the terrifying clown nightmare I'd been expecting.

But first a note about the author Will Elliott. Elliott is from my adopted home city Brisbane, so there's a certain level of squee for me reading this since I know the streets he's talking about and I can work out which hotel or club he's mocking based on the hints he gives which is awesome because I normally haven't been to the places in books I read. At the time of writing this book, Elliott had recently been diagnosed with schizophrenia and I think that adds a fascinating level to the novel. He's said that the book is in no way autobiographical, but considering the crux of the story is a young Brisbane male who "shares" his body and mind with a psychotic clown and has to try and find a way to extricate himself from the situation - I think it's safe to say that his own experiences aren't entirely divorced from the novel.

So if you read the synopsis up yonder, it seems like it has all the ingredients for a terrifying clown-filled horror novel that will have you literally shaking in your boots. It's actually a lot more of an absurdist dark comedy that plays with horror and thriller tropes than anything truly terrifying. And I actually think this played out a lot better than anything I expected to read. The real beauty of this novel is that so much is written matter-of-factly, "oh clowns wandering the streets? We are in New Farm afterall, no big deal" that it's only when you put it down to take a break or eat dinner that you realise how bat-shit crazy it actually is. The majority of the novel takes place in a circus that exists in some metaphysical space between Earth and Hell, where centuries-old circus folk put on shows for "tricks" (people on earth who wander into this show from an earth-bound circus or fair) because that's their job. Yes they're also doing it to collect the tricks' souls, but that's not nearly as important as putting on a Good Show. Add to this the co-owner of the circus, Kurt Pilo, who looks wolfish and eats teeth as snacks, one of the clowns is engaged to a fern, there's a yeti that eats glass which makes him sad, souls can grant wishes and murders are a regular occurrence. And while writing all of this makes me feel like I'm stuck in some kind of fun-house mirror room, in the book is just is. It's a circus that has something to do with Lovecraftian demon creatures, so of course things are crazy. Of course, everyone tries to kill each other. Of course the clown face paint transforms Jamie into the demonic JJ the Clown. Of course, there's a character called fishboy who is just lovely. Of Course, the circus is somehow responsible for WWII. It all just makes complete sense while you're caught up in the narrative, it's only back in the real world that the images start to seem warped and twisted.

While I say this book is more of a dark comedy, there are still instances of horror and suspense, so if you're horror-wary maybe don't run to your library for this book too quickly. The opening scenes that are set in Brisbane, where Jamie goes from hotel concierge to unwitting clown recruit, are brutal and tense. After picking up a bag of mysterious crystals that the clowns dropped (some kind of drugs, Jamie supposes), Jamie's house is destroyed, his housemate is kidnapped, he's poisoned and he sees the clowns in the basement of his hotel with a lit match preparing to blow the whole thing up. And this is only the first 20 or so pages. There are two more returns made to this above-world in the novel, and in both of these scenes the grotesquery and horror that seemed so normal in the circus was thrown into sharp relief. Will Elliott has a pretty sick and sinister underside, and considering this was his debut novel and he was in his early 20s when writing it, it's damn impressive how well he manages to accomplish all of this.

So if you're after a Halloween read that won't continue to haunt you post-Halloween, then I wholeheartedly recommend you take a closer look at this one from Will Elliott. Entertaining and well written with brief moments of pure horror, The Pilo Family Circus is still more likely to make you laugh than run for the bedcovers.