Review by Booklist Review
This is a tongue-in-cheek take on gothic fiction, though the stories don't veer into humor or parody; rather, Murray tweaks familiar elements. The title story is a modern take on du Maurier's Rebecca, detailing the disappearance of Simone, a woman who's married to a man about whom the protagonist has always had reservations. Like most of the stories, "Remote Controls" features characters inherently suspicious of one another; in this case, they're staying at a hotel together. "Vanishing Point" profiles a troubled artist who has to contend with his meddlesome parents at a rental on the Cape before being shipped off to Andover. There's a dark energy that looms over each of the stories, with most of the characters being academics, art historians, or artists. Horror readers who enjoy more prosaic elements will admire Murray's drawn-out, elaborate pacing. Overall, it's a well-written, satisfying collection with mystery elements for fans of Sarah Waters and Kate Morton.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Ghosts haunt this smart if repetitive collection from Murray (The Human Zoo). In "Apartment 4D," a highlight, the 20-something narrator becomes obsessed with the strange and possibly spectral behavior of a single mother and daughter who live down the hall from her. The equally strong "Remote Control" involves a vacationing man and his wife, who are irked by the TV in their room, which switches on every night at two a.m. Here and elsewhere, a ghost ends up shaping the proceedings. Even the dialogue-driven "First Cause," which has a less paranormal vibe than the others and mainly involves a couple's argument about their unhappiness, introduces a ghost. Over time, unfortunately, the formula loses its impact. After the protagonist of "The Third Boy" gets locked out of her home, for instance, it's not hard to suspect that the unsettling neighbor who takes her in may not be fully human. Still, on their own, Murray's gothic stories pulsate with ornate prose ("The house was so silent that one understood how quiet and still could be synonyms"). Each story has plenty of spookiness and intelligence, though with diminishing returns. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In Murray's new story collection, following her novel The Human Zoo, the suspense starts at the table of contents, with story titles building the requisite dread of all good ghost stories. The stories themselves are delightfully abundant, with well-wrought spookiness. Classic elements of the Gothic terrain--fog, shadows, scratching branches, whispers, knocks, and lots of ghosts--are all featured. What raises these stories to a fresh level is the juxtaposition of such tried-and-true tropes against the mundanity of the 21st century--the dropped cell service when lost on a shrouded moor or the romantic get-away to a darkly charming old house with a possessed TV. These modern elements cleverly charge the narrative and ratchet up the creep factor. As one character muses: "There was, apparently, an entire field of study that was devoted to this, that tied into physics, that was there to take the everyday and to torture it into something so complex and deranged as to make life fraught with inexplicable, limitless horror." VERDICT With frequent nods to both contemporary and classic ghost-story writers (Daphne Du Maurier, Henry James), the success of these stories lies not just in the well-crafted writing but in the conscious mixing of a shape-shifting old world with an unreliably secure modern world. A masterly recharging of a treasured literary tradition that Murray clearly loves and respects.--Laura Florence
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