Review by New York Times Review
"READING A book is a dangerous thing," says Remshi, the protagonist of Glen Duncan's by blood we live (Knopf, $25.95), speaking, you might say, the wisdom of the ages: He's the world's oldest vampire, 20,000 years young, give or take. "A book," he goes on to say, "can make you find room in yourself for something you never thought you'd understand. Or worse, something you never wanted to understand." Although it's always risky to attribute the thoughts of a fictional character to its creator, it's a reasonably safe bet that this bloodsucker's sentiments aren't far from those of the novelist, who has made a habit of writing books about things most of us would rather not understand too well. "By Blood We Live" is in fact the conclusion of a trilogy of first-person monster stories, begun in 2011 with "The Last Werewolf" and continued the next year in "Talulla Rising," for which Duncan's sprightly 2003 monologue, "I, Lucifer," could now be considered a warm-up. As Remshi sees it, learning to live with what your nature compels you to do is the only way to be a vampire - or, like Talulla, the book's heroine and the vampire's unlikely object of desire, a werewolf. "Find room for this or die" is his philosophy, and even given that "this" includes murder and exsanguination (and for werewolves even more unsavory acts), it's a fine credo for a writer of fiction too. For horror writers, especially, Remshi's words should ring out like Henry V's at Agincourt, a call to arms, a vigorous stirring of the literary warrior's blood. And yet the grisly few who do battle in this particular field don't always find as much room for their inner beasts as they should. Remshi, a hopeless romantic, believes that "Every life you take - like every book you read, even the bad ones - makes you a little bigger," but most readers of horror, I'd guess, don't feel significantly enlarged by their encounters with monsters on the printed page. Written horror seems itself a diminished thing these days. If the goal of the genre is merely to shock, appall, amaze, frighten and excite unwholesomely, there are plenty of more effective ways to get there: movies, TV shows, comics and games generally do that dirty work better, in 2014, than novels and short stories do. In my recent reading, I've found myself again and again wondering why a particular story needs to be a book. What are words doing here that images can't? Why am I reading about people fighting zombies when I could be watching "The Walking Dead" (or looking at Robert Kirkman's excellent comic)? What piece of 21st-century vampire literature can compare with Neil Jordan's great, sad, achingly beautiful film "Byzantium," which came and went too quickly a year ago? If there's nothing going on in a horror novel except action, reading it is like watching a movie in slow motion, one frame at a time, or looking at a comic book with no pictures. The good horror of the past few years, like Duncan's trilogy, makes at least some conscious effort to distinguish itself from visual storytelling by tapping into elements that are more or less specific to the experience of old-media - you know, words on a page - narrative: stuff like voice, shifting perspectives, verbal ambiguity. In Jennifer McMahon's THE WINTER PEOPLE (Doubleday, $25.95), for example, a pretty straightforward tale of mysterious disappearances in rural Vermont manages to engage your attention by alternating present-tense narration with entries from the journal of Sara Harrison Shea, dead for decades and somehow holding the key to a still-fresh supernatural mystery. McMahon is a scrupulous writer, nicely attentive to nuances of character and landscape. But the novel needs the added gravity lent by the old journal entries, particularly toward the end, when the plot, having thickened like a middle-aged waistline, huffs and puffs toward resolution. Through all the increasingly preposterous action, the mournful voice of Sara Shea lingers in the memory, and McMahon, wisely, gives her the fast word. FOR GENRE WRITERS, elaborate plotting is a constant temptation, and a trap. The Swedish novelist Marie Hermanson cannily embeds her awareness of that danger in the baroque overcomplication of THE DEVIL'S SANCTUARY (Grand Central, paper, $15), a Piranesi prison of a story. Its hero, named Daniel, pays a visit to his shady twin brother, Max, in a Swiss psychiatric hospital, and wakes up one morning to find that Max is gone and he, Daniel, can't get out. Nothing can persuade the mental health professionals that he isn't his brother. And the institution, whose idea of therapy is on the peculiar side, happens to be nestled in a peaceful valley from which it's just about impossible to escape. This is a workably nightmarish premise, which Hermanson exploits cleverly, doling out the odd glimmer of hope only to enmesh her hero, and the reader, more deeply in the no-exit web she's spinning. (The lively translation is by Neil Smith.) Since reading is a solitary activity, imprisoning you in your own head, a feeling of claustrophobia is something horror fiction can create pretty effectively. And every writer knows what it's like to be in a plot you can't see your way out of. The bad place from which there is apparently no escape is a popular motif in horror anyway - all those haunted houses whose doors keep slamming shut when people try to flee. The title location of THE MALL, by S.L. Grey (Corvus/Atlantic Books, paper, $12.95), is a particularly nasty variation because the physical reality of the place in question keeps changing, seeming to migrate between dimensions; the idea of something as simple as an exit feels, in this context, almost laughably quaint. The main character, a tough, drug-dependent black woman named Rhoda and a sad-sack white bookstore clerk named Daniel, start out in an actual South African shopping mall and wind up, for a time, in some sort of alternative, fun-house-mirror simulacrum of a mall, in which the principles of marketing and consumption are so rigidly observed that they've become a justification for slavery: Salespeople are chained to their counters, and shoppers are compelled, apparently on pain of death, to spend and spend and spend. What's most interesting about "The Mall," which is narrated in alternating chapters by Rhoda and Daniel, is that it begins with action and ends in contemplation, unlike most genre fiction. Chase sequences dominate the first part of the novel: Rhoda thinks of the experience in terms of movies, Daniel in terms of games. But as the book goes along, their voices, in their different ways, take on a more philosophical tone as they begin to wonder which of the two harsh realities available to them is actually the more unpalatable: The slave-state mall seduces them even as it imprisons them. "The Mall" is essentially satirical, but this is satire of the most mournful kind. Louise Beeston, the semi-reliable narrator of Sophie Hannah's devilishly elegant THE ORPHAN CHOIR (Picador, $25), feels trapped, too, at first in the Victorian townhouse she shares with her husband in Cambridge, England, and later in the very different setting of a planned-to-the-teeth gated community in the countryside. In Cambridge, she's driven to distraction by a rude neighbor who blares Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" through the shared walls at times Louise considers inappropriate. (Is there ever an appropriate time for Queen?) As if that weren't horror enough, her husband has engaged a contractor to sandblast the outside of the house, which requires sealing up all the windows, leaving poor Louise cocooned in darkness for weeks on end. What really stresses her out, though, is the sound - of unknown origin - of a children's choir singing liturgical music. She wants to blame the neighbor: Though it doesn't seem his sort of thing at all, she speculates that it's a dig at her for having sent her 7-year-old son to board at Saviour College School, which has a prestigious choir. The reader, of course, suspects that the music is all in Louise's head, a symptom of her guilt for having agreed to send her son away. In the extremely funny first half of "The Orphan Choir," the narrator's sleep-deprived paranoia and irritability intensify steadily, to the point where her credibility - with her husband, her neighbors, the authorities to whom she doggedly complains and, most of all, the reader - is pretty much shot. But when the scene shifts to the country, the balance of belief begins, subtly, gradually, to alter, and supernatural possibilities start seeping into the mind like the English fog. Every ghost story worthy of the name breathes that musty air of ambiguity. Turn the words one way, you're imagining things; turn them another, you're being haunted. Hannah is primarily a writer of crime stories, and, perhaps from long habit, considerately ends by supplying a full explanation of these strange goings-on. Susan Hill (who also writes mysteries) prefers not to. THE MIST IN THE MIRROR (Vintage, paper, $15), published in England in 1992 and only now seeing the light of print here, tells the perfectly ambiguous story of an orphan named James Monmouth, who returns to England after years of globe-trotting in the wake of a famous adventurer, Conrad Vane. On his home soil, he finds himself unsettled by inexplicable apparitions, odd coincidences and disturbing whispers about the long-dead Vane, and starts to wonder who, for all these years, has been pursuing whom. As he drifts through the country, from London to the wild North, his sense of himself becomes, at times, perilously shaky, and he feels as if he were in "some uncertain nightmare world, where things changed and shifted, and I could no longer trust my own senses." At one point, he asks himself a series of questions that distill the essence of the classic ghost story: "Were the incidents linked, or quite random? Were they meaningless? Was I making connections where none existed? Had they meaning? Had anything? Were the phantoms and warnings and fearful moments brought about by anything outside myself, or was I losing my sanity? Was there nothing without, only things within?" Without or within is always the question, and Hill knows, as Henry James and Shirley Jackson did, that it's a question best left only partly answered. Metaphoric demons can be as deadly as malevolent specters, after all. LITERARY GHOSTS HAVE, on the whole, had better luck holding their own against visual forms of horror than other weird entities have, because the action in ghost stories always takes place most crucially in the imagination - in the minds of people who, like James Monmouth, are constantly questioning the evidence of their senses. That sort of self-interrogation tends not to be provoked by encounters with, say, zombies, werewolves or vampires. In Glen Duncan's novels, it's the monsters who do all the ruminating and philosophizing. In "By Blood We Live," both the vampire Remshi and the werewolf Talulla are at least tantalized, if not a little obsessed, by the possibility of discovering some coherence - a story - in their bizarre existence. They're fiends for meaning. "This is the gift of the blood," Remshi says. "Slake the thirst and the world gestures beyond itself to an underlying blueprint. The world is a series of vivid clues to the riddle beyond appearances. The world has a purpose, a pattern, a story, a plot." Easy for him to say: He's 20 millenniums old. Talulla, who's been a werewolf for only a few years, is still so desperate to understand her condition that she risks her life in pursuit of an archaeologist's journal that might explain the origins of lycanthropy. "Maybe the truth of how it all began," she hopes. "Maybe the truth of what it all meant." Because Duncan's monsters are, between atrocities, seekers of truth, they're not quite as terrifying as such creatures usually are; sometimes they're as uncertain and confused as we humans. It may not even be useful to think of Duncan's remarkable trilogy as horror fiction. But these books do have a lot to say to writers of horror, because their characters are irreducibly verbal creations, beasts who are trying to read the world and who are, thanks to Duncan, presenting themselves to be read. In the end, "By Blood We Live" really does feel sort of dangerous, in a way that genre horror almost never does. At one point, a young vampire, newly turned, quotes Remshi to the effect that "you couldn't trust it, the feeling of things seeming to mean things." And then she corrects herself: "Or what he'd actually said was you had to trust it and mistrust it, to keep bouncing between the two." That's what we do when we read anything, horror or not, finding room for what we hope will make us a little bigger. When books are as good as Duncan's, we can drink them in greedily, as Remshi does, and still live with ourselves. Just not as long. TERRENCE RAFFERTY, the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 1, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* After a night of partying, 19-year-old Ruthie awakens to a world of impossibilities: her mother, an off-the-grid hippie who rarely leaves their Vermont farm, is missing, and Ruthie is left to care for her young sister. Ruthie desperately searches their old farmhouse for clues and uncovers a hidden compartment in her mother's room filled with frightening artifacts: a pair of strangers' wallets, a loaded gun, and a book entitled Visitors from the Other Side: The Secret Diary of Sara Harrison Shea. The diary reveals a 100-year-old mystery lending credence to the campfire tales about their farm, the nearby Devils' Hand rock formation, locals who have gone missing, and her mother's warnings that bad things happen in their woods. Ruthie begins tracking her mother with the information in the wallets and soon finds links between the diary's horrors and her mother's disappearance. McMahon has developed a subgenre of psychological mysteries that pit female characters with humanizing strengths and vulnerabilities against old secrets posing present dangers, forcing them to confront mystery and legend in creepily seductive settings. This mystery-horror crossover is haunting, evocative, and horrifically beautiful, a triumph that shares good literary company with Karen Novak's Five Mile House (2000), Tananarive Due's The Good House (2003), Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale (2006), and Robert McCammon's Speaks the Nightbird (2007).--Tran, Christine Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this scary thriller, McMahon (The One I Left Behind) explores how far people will go to save the ones they love, and what results when they go too far. In 1908, Sara Harrison Shea, a resident of West Hall, Vt., becomes convinced she can bring her murdered daughter back to life. In the present day, 19-year-old Ruthie Washburne's mother vanishes from their farm without a trace, forcing Ruthie to research West Hall's dark history of disappearances, animal sacrifice, and inexplicable phenomena. Ruthie's chilling discovery that Sara was found murdered with her skin removed a few months after her daughter's burial raises the stakes. Almost every character is imbued with a great deal of psychological depth, which makes the stereotypical portrayal of Auntie, a Native American sorceress, all the more disappointing. McMahon is more successful when she deftly switches between past and present, using the changes in perspective to increase the tension. Author tour. Agent: Daniel Lazar, Writers House. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Would you do anything to bring a lost loved one back to life? McMahon's (Promise Not To Tell) latest novel weaves the chilling tale of Sara Harrison Shea, whose life was full of tragedy and brutal deaths. In 1908, after her daughter mysteriously dies, Sara is found flayed to death, presumably by her husband, who commits suicide at the scene. For years the townspeople swear they see Sara at the sites of many local tragedies, and even skeptics leave gifts for her on their doorsteps in hopes of escaping her wrath. Generations later, a new family moves into Sara's home. Nineteen-year-old Ruthie and her sister, Fawn, live in fear of the mysterious forest behind their house, where "sleepers" are rumored to live. These pale, bloodthirsty spirits of the undead are the result of grief-stricken family members using dark magic to bring their loved ones back to life. When Ruthie's mother goes missing, the sisters embark on a downright creepy journey to find her, a journey that also reveals the truth about Sara. Verdict Extremely well written with a story line that is sure to delight (and frighten) thriller lovers and supernatural fans, this novel has the makings of a blockbuster horror flick. [Prepub Alert, 9/15/13.]-Chelsie Harris, San Diego Cty. Lib. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A peaceful Vermont village turns creepy in this tale of the dead returning to life. Sara Harrison Shea's precious daughter, Gertie, dies in 1908 during a harsh and unforgiving winter in which her mother and father, Martin, struggle to keep food on the table. Gertie isn't the first child Sara has lost, but her death is the one she has the most difficult time accepting. When she refuses to believe that Gertie is gone forever and blames Martin for her loss, Sara sets in motion a tragic and horrifying chain of events that will forever change the lives of everyone around them. Flashing back and forth between Sara's time period and the present, the author evokes a sense of suffering and hopelessness as she gathers a cast of characters who bring out the worst in one another: the mysterious, otherworldly Auntie who raised Sara and died before Gertie's birth; the present-day sisters, Ruthie and lemur-eyed, feverish Fawn, who live with their mother, Alice, known in the town as the Egg Lady; and Katherine, newly arrived, a recent widow and artist who is also mourning her lost son. Alice and her late husband were careful to shield their daughters from the outside world, forbidding them access to the Internet, television and other technology, and home-schooling Ruthie. So when Alice vanishes, Ruthie's search for her causes her to cross paths with people and things she doesn't understand. McMahon, a masterful storyteller who understands how to build suspense, creates an ocean of tension that self-implodes in the last two-thirds of the book. That's when her characters make implausible decisions that cause them to behave like teens in low-budget horror films who know there's a mad killer on the loose, yet when they hear noises in the basement, they go down alone to investigate anyway. Although she writes flawless prose, McMahon's characters' improbable choices derail her story.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
