Tag Archives: book review

Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill (2023)

This is a spoiler-free lightly revised version of the brief review of Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill (2023) that I posted on Goodreads.

Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is a beloved novel whose fans have opinions. Strong opinions. Having published one of the critical essays on Hill House in editor Kristopher Woofter’s Bram Stoker Award nominated essay collection Shirley Jackson: A Companion (2021), I also have strong opinions.

One might even say I can be a huge ass about Hill House.

Yes, one might say that.

Nevertheless, I’m an Elizabeth Hand fan and I understood A Haunting on the Hill to be set in Jackson’s Hill House but not an attempt to retell the original story or rewrite the house’s history, so I think I was pretty open-minded going in – despite the fact that Hand’s premise puts a playwright and a bunch of actors in the house to workshop a new play.

Okay, cards on the table. Having, in my youth – wrangled actors in allegedly haunted locations for a lot less money than the whole melodramatic experience was worth, I did have a couple reservations about the premise while waiting for my copy to arrive.

I thought Hand did a nice job or incorporating a number of turns of phrase of details into the story that generally go unremarked on even by ardent Hill House fans, and I look forward to a careful reread and perhaps a conversation with Hand someday because I’m certain there are details gleaned from early drafts of Jackson’s novel that one would only know by sitting down at the Library of Congress and digging in to Shirley’s papers and that delights me, whether Hand did that work or merely channeled Shirley, the result is great fun. But honestly, it was the moment when we learned that Hand’s character Amanda drove a Morris Minor that fully opened my heart, as I can’t see one of those sleek little sports cars without thinking about how much Shirley Jackson loved her own Morris and what a terror she was reputed to be behind the wheel.

(Without spoilers) there were a few elements I wish Hand had developed a bit more and I was tempted to give A Haunting on the Hill 4 stars. but the fact that I devoured it in a day and that (surprisingly early on) I quit picturing the characters as people I know and simply heard them as their own individual selves inclined me to push this up to 5 stars.

A Haunting on the Hill stands on its own, and readers unacquainted with Jackson’s work or any of the fanciful film or television adaptations which stray from the source material but lend a certain familiarity to the story won’t have any trouble getting lost in this creepy house along with Hand’s cast of characters. I can see how fans of Jackson’s work may take umbrage with the conceit Hand offers, but I think it’s worth remembering that Jackson’s Hill House was a place seemingly with a will of its own. From my perspective, the most tantalizing descriptions of that power are offered to us from the perspectives of unreliable narrators and willful women pushing back against the constricting machinations of patriarchy and capitalism and heteronormativity. Hand operates in the same register as Jackson in this regard, and her Hill House is an engaging and alluring and repellent place well worth visiting this Halloween season.

Review: The Circle by Dave Eggers

The Circle

The Circle by Dave Eggers
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In his 2013 novel, The Circle, Dave Eggers leaves the specifics of how The Circle’s technology works to the reader’s imagination, a gambit that can be generative in the hands of certain writers. However, Eggers wrote a 500 page book about an Internet company but seems to understand neither the Internet nor companies. That’s a whole other ballgame, particularly when he embeds his imaginary techno-nightmare in reality by name-checking Steve Jobs, Facebook, Google, and the like. Furthermore, Eggers has written a female protagonist, Mae Holland, but doesn’t seem to understand women very well.

That said, if I were teaching my college course on cyberculture again any time soon, I would almost certainly put it on a supplementary reading list because I believe it raises some interesting question, even if accidentally. (privatization of government, voter protections, and the right to opt out among them). Nevertheless, I wavered over whether to give it 1 or 2 stars.

I can accept that the idealistic young tech workers of The Circle truly believe in what they’re doing. I can believe that they have no concerns about the economics, access to private land, the digital divide, literacy, or any of the other factors that would in reality hopefully prevent the whole world from buying in to the kind of technology being developed. I have met these people and they are legion. I think that Eggers does capture that sense of excitement, exhaustion, and optimism that fuels ambitious workers at young companies, especially young people with expensive educational debt, and limited job prospects. Additionally, and without spoilers, I think that Eggers captures the desperation of the chronically ill in the current American healthcare and insurance system. When the Circle puts Mae’s father, whose MS is not being managed or treated due to lack of insurance, onto her health plan, Mae has strong motivation to hold on to her job no matter what is asked of her. That premise gets stretched increasingly thin as the book progresses, and eventually the way Mae treats her family increases my alienation from her rather than garnering sympathy.

The plotholes and authorial pratfalls undermine elements which are the stuff of good satire, but are too spoilery to outline here. Even these fall short, however, because the plot is predicated on the idea that most of the world will buy into The Circle’s technology because the Internet magically became a civil place when the Circle rolled out TruYou, an authentication system that removes the possibility of anonymity or privacy from online comments, commerce, or social interactions. Seriously? What? No.

Now I know why I read the first half of this book the week it was released and then banished it to a distant corner of my office. When the trailer for the feature film adaptation starring Emma Watson/Tom Hanks was released, I decided to finish the book. If the movie is even slightly as naive as the book, it must be a trainwreck and, when I wrote this original review in 2017 I fully intended to catch a cheap matinee, but then apparently came to my senses. It has a 15% tomatometer rating! That’s actually a lot higher than I expected.


View all of my reviews at Goodreads or read the full versions with embedded links here. This review was originally posted on Goodreads January 02, 2018 and has been updated with links and additional information for this post.

Review: Bernard Taylor’s The Reaping

The Reaping

The Reaping by Bernard Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In 2017, Grady Hendrix published Paperbacks From Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction. The lovelies at Valancourt Books launched a Paperbacks from Hell series in the Spring of 2019 and, of course, I jumped on the subscription offer for the first 6 editions.

Bernard Taylor’s 1980 novel The Reaping arrived in June and I’m pretty sure I read it cover-to-cover late one night out on the front porch, as one does in the summertime. The Paperbacks from Hell edition includes an introduction by Will Errickson.

This clever but uneven work leads the reader to assume they’re plunging in to a retro-modern Gothic tale about an artist commissioned to paint a portrait of a frail young heiress in a mysterious mansion. But once all of the squares are covered on the Gothic bingo card, the author begins flinging twists at the reader with gleeful abandon. Although it serves the story well not to waste momentum on any occult theories or ponderous monologues, the change in tone and pace are jarring and the ending is rather abrupt.

To be fair, the twists are fun and the ending works well enough. I found Thomas, the painter, realistically self-absorbed and enjoyed that the reader can never be sure whether he’s a great painter or not (avoiding spoilers), but his self-absorption also wears a bit thin at times. Nevertheless, an excellent inclusion in the Paperbacks from Hell series, which kicked off with the eco-horror of The Nest and was followed by When Darkness Loves You, which has an astronomically high level of what-the-fuckitude. It’s the Paperbacks from Hell context and Errickson’s fine introduction which nudge The Reaping from 3 to 4 stars.

View all my reviews at Goodreads or read the full versions with embedded links here. This review was originally posted on Goodreads June 03, 2019 and has been updated with links and additional information for this post.

Review: Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall (2015)

Wylding Hall

Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In the land before time, I taught Audio Engineering with a focus on film sound. Consequently, I have a particular fondness for fiction in the “manager locks up band in a secluded location to record an album & mayhem ensues” genre, which intersects in interesting ways with the “ghost hunters bite off more than they can chew in a secluded house” and the related “student filmmakers set up shop in a haunted house and mayhem ensues” genres. Much like the actual entertainment industry, in horror fiction it’s all fun and games in the haunted house, until its not. Then it’s still fun and games for the reader, and doubly so for those of us who feel like we’ve lived some of these scenes in real-life, albeit with less bloodshed and more substance abuse.

But I digress.

Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall (2015) is a novella structured in a sort of behind-the-music-esque epistolary form. It’s got band drama, a creepy house, a mystery, and enough similarity to actual events to create a frisson of reality for readers who know a bit of English folk music history. Plus, it has a potentially colorful cast of characters wistfully trying to recount events from a time when they were all young, beautiful, and wasted. Hand weaves this all together in an intriguing manner and this is a fast, fun, eerie read.

Forty years after the mysterious disappearance of their lead guitarist, the surviving members of the fictional acid-folk band Windhollow Faire, their manager, and one band member’s ex-girlfriend (now a professional psychic) sit for individual interviews with a documentarian. The narrative unfolds as we jump from interview snippet to interview snippet. Although I feel that Hand did a brilliant job of creating and maintaining mystery and suspense using this technique, and each character is well-realized, their voices are too similar and I often found myself skipping back a page to remind myself who is supposed to be speaking. In less-skillful hands, this would sink the book, but the story is intriguing enough to put up with this minor annoyance.

So, the plot, without spoilers: After (fictional) acid-folk band Windhollow Faire releases their first album, their lead singer dies at the apartment of lead guitarist, Julian Drake. A new lead lead singer is recruited to replace dearly departed but not especially talented Annabelle. Their manager rents a medieval country house in Hampshire and stashes them away for 3 months to write, rehearse, and recover from the tragedy.

Hand was inspired by the true story of the British folk band Fairport Convention, whose manager rented a country house in Hampshire called Farley Chamberlayne so they could regroup after the tragic deaths of their drummer and their lead guitarist’s girlfriend, and record a new album.

I don’t know if Fairport Convention invoked any otherworldly forces during their time in Hampshire. but Windhollow Faire get more than they bargained for when clues emerge that Julian’s brilliant songwriting may be more than metaphorically magical.

In a lengthy interview with Locus, excerpted online on the magazine’s website, Hand talks about her folk-horror vision for Wylding Hall:

‘‘Just because you’re young and really stoned and in a weird creepy place, that doesn’t mean something really weird and creepy isn’t actually happening. I like the notion, too, that you don’t know you’ve seen a ghost until afterward. There’s an Edith Wharton story called ‘Afterward’. Somebody saw something, or they didn’t see something, and then later on they put it together and realized they had seen a ghost. I wanted to play with that, the idea of sunlit horror. Most of Wylding Hall takes place during the day.”

In a recent review of another book by Hand (Waking the Moon), I grumbled a lot about the lengthy insertions of lyrics and incantations. These inclusions are much more effective in Wylding Hall, and they also make more narrative sense as we’re meant to be watching musicians participating in the age-old process of adapting and contemporizing traditional ballads. That process is not only a vital way to keep the art form alive, but also a vital way to conjure dark forces which will allow mayhem to ensue. And at the end of the day, you can’t ask for much more than that from a lively horror story about a group of musicians in a creepy house!

Indiebound lists a full-cast audiobook of Wylding Hall that looks rather tempting, particularly since it might solve the “wait, who’s talking in this part?” problem.

View all my reviews at Goodreads or read the full versions with embedded links here.

Review: The Crossing Places

The Crossing Places (Ruth Galloway, #1)

The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I picked up a copy of the 7th novel in the Ruth Galloway series (The Ghost Fields) at a library book sale and enjoyed it enough to start at the beginning. The Crossing Places is the first in this series by Elly Griffiths and it won the Mary Higgins Clark Award when it debuted in 2011.

The story unfolds at a good clip and Griffiths does doles out the clues deliberately and offers enough doubt and misdirection to keep things interesting to the very end. Because I read the 7th book first, I knew quite a bit about who was going to survive, who couldn’t possibly be the killer, and who was going to end up friends in the future. Although this had the disadvantage of informing me early on that at least one the prime suspects in the twisting case was innocent, it also intrigued me as I wondered how Griffiths will develop these characters over the next 5 books to get them to the place in their lives in which I first encountered them.

Protagonist Dr. Ruth Galloway is a well-written, wholly believable forensic archaeologist who teaches at a University in Norfolk, England and lives by the sea with her cats and a host of relatable quirks. Ruth has lived in her cottage for some years, having been drawn to the place after working on a dig at a henge site in the nearby saltmarsh 10 years ago. Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson brings Ruth into a case after the bones of a child are found near the site and she’s drawn into a cold case that has bedeviled Harry for 10 years.

The complications of doing archaeological work in a salt marsh, the absurdities of academia, and the challenges of working with self-declared descendant communities such as modern-day Druids are all concisely but vividly described and these details are woven into the plot to give the story a sense of realism without pulling you out of the main mystery.

Although this series began in 2011, all of the books in it have interminable waits at my public library, which I’m (mostly, sort of) delighted about because everyone should read about the travails of relatable archaeologists who neither look nor behave like Lara Croft. (No offense, Lara. But seriously, we need to talk about those white tank tops and also the looting). I have plenty to keep me busy in the meantime, but I still rather wish my neighbors would learn to read faster.








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