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So, Just After Sunset is the second volume in my Stephen King short-stories-to-shock-you-out-of-illness mini-readathon.
This is a classic collection of thirteen or so short stories, and like all such collections a mixed bunch. The usual King themes are here – fighting back against violence, creepy cats, ghosts and revenge.
Not going to go into each story but I can tell you that my favourites were:
The Things They Left Behind – a 9/11 story
N – in the the tradition of Arthur Machen and MR James but modern day creepiness
The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates – sad
Another good collection.
I’ve been fairly quiet recently, partly due to stressful stuff at work (more of that on another occasion perhaps) but mostly because I have had a really nasty, horrible, debilitating cold for a few weeks and am only just beginning to feel that I’m properly recovering. I managed to struggle through one review last week and that took so much out of me that I had to go and lie down in a darkened room. Or something.
When I was first developing said cold, two weeks ago today in fact, I really didn’t feel like doing very much, couldn’t settle to TV or reading anything that required huge amounts of concentration and anything with more than one syllables was definitely out of the question.
But I was bored and had to do something in between medication and naps, and decided that graphic novels were just the thing.
Started with Amphigorey by one of my heroes Edward Gorey. This is a collection of (I think) fifteen of Gorey’s works and was ideal because the ratio of pictures to words was high (or do I mean low – more of the former than the latter, anyway) and of course Gorey’s wonderfully gothic sensibility is just the ticket when you’re feeling a bit under the weather. Loved it as much as I knew I would.
I then moved on to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (I actually wanted to call him the Ancient Manager, which is how I feel at the moment), and this was great fun in a very different way. The poem is one of my favourites (though over the years I’ve singularly failed to memorise it, though not for want of trying) and I have loved Hunt Emerson’s cartoons in Fortean Times which I have subscribed to for years. And the image of the albatross with a rubber-suckered arrow stuck on his head still tickles me.
So picture books good for early stages of a cold. When I actually gave in, stopped struggling in to work and flumped, I at least didn’t have a headache and could read more words I actually read more over that few days than I had in the weeks before so every cloud has a silver lining. But more of those later.
So while on holiday I finally got around to reading Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger.
Now, this was always going to be a bit of a big deal because I had so enjoyed The Time Traveler’s Wife, which I read before starting this blog and have never reviewed here – suffice to say (as I’m sure I already have) that I became heavily emotionally involved with that novel to the point of almost disgracing myself by crying on public transport over the ending.
And I suspect that’s why I waited until this came out in paperback and even after I bought it didn’t leap into reading it immediately, concerned as I was that I might hate it. But thankfully I didn’t (though I get the impression that some other readers were disappointed in it.)
In terms of plot, this is really a story about two sets of twins, Edie and Elspeth, and Edie’s daughters Valentina and Julia. Elspeth dies at the beginning of the novel, never having reconciled with her sister after an estrangement lasting 20 years, and leaves her flat overlooking Highgate Cemetery to her American nieces, with the proviso that Edie never goes there and that her papers are removed by her neighbour and lover Robert. The only fly in the ointment is that Elspeth comes back as a ghost.
Will her presence become known to the other inhabitants? Will the big secret she has been hiding come out? Will there be unintended consequences?
Well, yes, of course there will.
I took absolutely ages to read this, not because I wasn’t enjoying it or didn’t want to know what was going to happen, but possibly just because it was not sufficiently light for a holiday read. I was determined not to set is aside, though, as whenever I did pick it up I enjoyed reading it. It’s fair to say that I didn’t connect with it the way I did with TTTW but I enjoyed the story, though I found Valentina and Julia really annoying at times and was in many ways more interested in Robert, Martin (another neighbour, one with OCD who compiles crosswords), the setting and the practical problems around corporeality in ghosts. I’m ashamed to say that I have lived in London for over 20 years and never once been to any of the great cemeteries, though the pull of both Highgate and Kensal Green is now very strong.
The big secret didn’t really come as a huge revelation; I had already wondered if it was going to be along the lines that it eventually turned out to be (grammatically awful way of expressing it, but I’m sure you know what I mean), although I didn’t get the details exactly right. I also found the ending a little abrupt.
But I have to say that I enjoyed it, and may even pick it up again in the future as, now that I know the story, I’m sure there are nuances that I missed on the first read.
If I had been participating in Carl’s RIP V challenge I would certainly have tried to claim this as my second read.
So this is a recommendation from Silvery Dude for which he does need to receive full credit as it was a really good read; bought last year and dragged all the way to Scotland and back during my annual holiday so that I could totally fail to read it as part of last year’s RIP IV challenge, but definitely worth waiting for.
And I say this as someone who has a bit of a love/hate relationship with Peter Ackroyd, though to be fair it’s currently waited heavily on the love side, if only for his masterful biography of London.
Anyway, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is exactly what it says on the tin; it’s Frankenstein’s own version of his experiments and their outcome with particular emphasis on those close to him. So much so normal revised version of old story, but this has a couple of interesting aspects to it which made it more than just another retelling of something familiar.
There is the standard mix of fact and fiction, so we get to meet Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and Dr Polidori. But most of the experiments take place in and around London’s East End rather than on the continent. We have resurrectionists bringing whole corpses rather than the body parts sewn together thing so beloved of old movies. We have stuff about doppelgängers, split personalities, cutting-edge scientific experimentation taken to its limits all explained by someone who can at best be described as an unreliable narrator.
It has a wonderfully creepy and unsettling atmosphere which wasn’t lost on me despite the fact that I read it mostly in balzing hot sunshine rather than howling autumnal wind and rain which might have suited it slightly better.
I will say that I was slightly thrown by the end which, though it makes sense when you look back at the novel seemed to happen very suddenly. But that shouldn’t take away from what was a really good story well told.
So how do you review an Edward Gorey book?
The Iron Tonic doesn’t have a plot as such. It has twenty-eight lines of poetry. But of course the thing about Gorey is the artwork; the illustrations are wonderful, bizarre, Gothic and worth paying attention to. And the subtitle probably tells you all you need to know: a winter afternoon in Lonely Valley.
And I for one agree that the careful stroller should beware of objects falling from the air….
So, more Gothic creepiness from the wonderful Mr Priestley in Tales of Terror from the Tunnel’s Mouth, and a good read for RIP IV.
Robert Harper is returning to school, desperate to get away from his stepmother with whom he has been spending his time while his father is fighting the Boers in South Africa. Robert is travelling by train, and we first meet him on the platform with said stepmother, an emotional woman who has a premonition that something will happen to Robert, involving a tunnel and a kiss. Robert shakes her off, gets on the train and finds himself in a carriage which slowly fills up with a number of gentlemen also travelling to London.
Robert dozes off, and when he wakes up he finds that all the other passengers are asleep except for a young woman with red hair, dressed completely in white, who is sitting opposite him. The train has stopped at the mouth of a railway tunnel, and to while away the time the mysterious woman tells Robert a number of sinister stories, while he struggles to keep awake…..
Another really enjoyable collection, with a little mystery at its heart – who is the woman in white? What (if anything) does she want with young Robert? Why is everyone else solidly asleep?
Favourites in this collection are:
- The Glasshouse – you really shouldn’t get too close to some of those plants….
- The Crotach Stone – beware the auld folk….
- Sister Veronica – art appreciation and nuns…
And the illustrations by David Roberts are equally creepy.
This is my second read for RIP IV
This is not my first exposure to the Gothic creepy tales of Chris Priestley; last year I read and reviewed this, and Tales of Terror from the Black Ship has a very similar structure.
Ethan and Cathy are ill, and have been left home alone by their father who has gone off in search of a doctor. But this is no ordinary home; The Old Inn is perched on top of a cliff which is only joined to the Cornish coastline by a bridge of rock. A huge and powerful storm has blown up and while they wait for their father to return, they are joined by a mysterious stranger called Thackeray, a youngish man who has somehow managed to make his way to the inn through the treacherous weather. He settles in to see out the storm, and to “entertain” the children he tells them creepy stories, all connected with the sea and sailors.
And after that it’s more of the same, which is no bad thing in my book. The stories are nicely unsettling, as is the wraparound tale, because it becomes very clear that something is not quite right in Ethan and Cathy’s world.
Favourites for me were The Boy in the Boat (beware innocent looking little children), Nature (you will never look at snails the same way again, though in all honesty I have trouble looking at them at the best of times), and The Scrimshaw Imp (I didn’t know what scrimshaw was until I read this).
I really enjoyed this book, and the unsettling nature of some of the tales wasn’t lessened by the fact that I was reading it during a more or less sunny late July. Recommended for the Gothic lovers among us, this would have worked really well for Carl’s RIP challenge.
Bride of the Book God 