The Little Stranger
Author: Sarah Waters
Publication Date: 4/30/09
Publisher: Riverhead Books

Blurb (GR): A chilling and vividly rendered ghost story set in postwar Britain, by the bestselling and award-winning author of The Night Watch and Fingersmith.

Sarah Waters's trilogy of Victorian novels Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith earned her legions of fans around the world, a number of awards, and a reputation as one of today's most gifted historical novelists. With her most recent book, The Night Watch, Waters turned to the 1940s and delivered a tender and intricate novel of relationships that brought her the greatest success she has achieved so far. With The Little Stranger, Waters revisits the fertile setting of Britain in the 1940s-and gives us a sinister tale of a haunted house, brimming with the rich atmosphere and psychological complexity that have become hallmarks of Waters's work.

The Little Stranger follows the strange adventures of Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor. One dusty postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline-its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.

Abundantly atmospheric and elegantly told, The Little Stranger is Sarah Waters's most thrilling and ambitious novel yet.

Review:
Looking back at The Little Stranger, I think I quite liked the novel as a whole, especially the ending that wrapped up the tale in a curious and deliciously ambiguous and enigmatic way.

This sort-of-ghost-story is an interesting portrayal of the downfall of an aristocratic family in post-war Britain and a deep exploration of what it means (psychologically) for such a family to witness a slow dilapidation of its once grand estate.

Sarah Waters's writing is elegant and her descriptions of both decaying Hundreds Hall and its defeated inhabitants are haunting and atmospheric. And the narrator, Dr. Faraday, the over-involved spectator, is quite an amusing specimen to watch and get to know.

My main problem is, though, why couldn't this book be a couple of hundred pages shorter? I couldn't help myself wishing Daphne du Maurier had written it in half the page count. As much as I enjoyed Waters' writing, I felt the pacing at times was excruciatingly slow. I am glad I decided to listen to the audio version of this novel, because, truth be told, I don't think I have enough stamina for such a slow-moving, atmosphere- rather than plot-oriented story. The audio allowed me to keep up with the narration easily (in reality, not much happens in this novel), while not missing out on much during the times I found my mind drifting away from the story.

It is amazing how different The Little Stranger is from Sarah Waters's debut novel. Even though both novels are very worthy creations, I personally much prefer the author's romp-y and raunchy Tipping the Velvet.

3/5 stars

Let the Right One In
Author: John Ajvide Lindqvist
Publication Date: 10/28/08
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

Blurb (GR): It is autumn 1981 when the inconceivable comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenage boy is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at long last---revenge for the bullying he endures at school, day after day.

But the murder is not the most important thing on his mind. A new girl has moved in next door---a girl who has never seen a Rubik’s Cube before, but who can solve it at once. There is something wrong with her, though, something odd. And she only comes out at night. . . .

Review:
I can't even find the words to describe how much I LOVED this novel. But let me start by warning Twilight lovers that this book is not about sexy sparkly vampires and teenage love. If you are not ready to read about ugly realities of human life, do not open this book.

It is not an easy book to read. The story is complex and involves many characters, whose presence sometimes is just momentary. The action moves from one character to another very quickly. But once you understand the pace and get used to foreign names, the story consumes you.

I will not relay the plot here, if you want to know what exactly the book is about, there are many reviews here that describe the story well. What I am going to say is that this is simply the best vampire novel I've ever read. Yes, I am putting it higher even than legendary Bram Stoker's "Dracula." This story is so much more complex and interesting in a way that not only does it show vampires from the point of view of their victims, but it also shows the world through the eyes of the vampires. We find out how very often innocent people become those feared monsters, we go through the transformation with them, we feel their guilt and shame, we learn about their relationships with their "Guardians" (who sometimes are worse monsters than vampires themselves).

But this book is not only about vampires, it explores the world of adolescent boys (the world I know nothing about). Surprisingly, I found out how important presence of a father in a boy's life. Without the guidance a love of a father, boys are lost to violence and abuse.

With all the horridness described in this book, it is strangely full of love and tenderness, understanding and forgiveness.

I highly recommend this book. You simply will not be able to walk away untouched by it.

5/5 stars

_The Hellbound Heart
Author: Clive Barker
Publication Date: 1986
Publisher: HarperCollins

Blurb (Amazon):  Frank Cotton's insatiable appetite for the dark pleasures of pain led him to the puzzle of Lemarchand's box, and from there, to a death only a sick-minded soul could invent. But his brother's love-crazed wife, Julia, has discovered a way to bring Frank back—though the price will be bloody and terrible . . . and there will certainly be hell to pay.

Review:
I'm assuming everyone in the world has seen the last Harry Potter movie? This isn’t a spoiler but there is this part in the movie where Voldemort is in some place that looks like a train station and he looks like a cross between some sort of fetus and a seahorse. When I saw it with my friends, we were all wondering what the frak we were looking at…in fact, it is pretty safe to say that I am still wondering a few months later. So I know Clive Barker wrote this novella decades before HP7p1 would come out but nevertheless, the movie impacted my reading enjoyment. Why? Because a man in The Hellbound Heart is trying to become more flesh and bone (just like good ol’ Voldy) and needs blood to do so. As he becomes more substantial there is a period of time where all I could picture was some weird-looking seahorse thing flapping around in a corner. This is supposed to scare me? Mission NOT accomplished. Also, Barker went out of his way to mention one of the victims’ saggy, gray underwear before he dies. I was more disgusted by the saggy briefs than the murder.

I feel a bit foolish that I didn’t know the movie Hellraiser was based on this novella until my book club buddy told me at our meeting. Because I read an e-version rather than the DTB, I didn’t have the benefit of all the creepy drawings. (Tip #1: Read the DTB. Actually there is only one tip.) I said to my friends, “Hey! That picture looks like that guy Pinhead from that horror movie!” Cue the cricket noises. Considering how short this work is (around 125 pages), Barker really packs a punch of a story. The brevity of the work really limits characterization and plot development. It felt like I was walking down a cafeteria line and just looking at all the things I could have but then never taking a bite of any of it. What kind of woman would just start killing people to feed blood to the demonish presence that may or may not be her brother-in-law with whom she had a rape-and-if-not-rape-certainly-rapey experience with before her wedding? Who the hell moves into a house where one room is totally dank and seemingly haunted? Who disposes of bodies and/or bags of bones by just tossing them in the spare room? Who finds a crazy-ass box in a haunted house and just starts playing around with it? (because that can only have GOOD results, right?) I just had to stop typing for a second to laugh at the memory of us rehashing the plot of this novella at book club.

Here’s the lowdown:
Was it scary? No.
Am I an idiot for not realizing Hellraiser was based on this book? Yes.
Do I recommend it to horror lovers? Meh, not really.
Was it worth the read? Yes, for the weirdness.
Do I want to watch the movie now? Yes, if only to see if there is a seahorse fetus scene. 

The Girl Next Door
Author: Jack Ketchum
Published: 1989
Publisher: Dorchester Books, Leisure Books

Blurb (GR): A teenage girl is held captive and brutally tortured by neighborhood children. Based on a true story, this shocking novel reveals the depravity of which we are all capable.

Review:
This is a fictional story based on an actual 1965 killing of a teenage girl in Indiana. The girl, Sylvia Likens and her sister Jenny were put into the care of a single mother by her carnie parents. The woman, Gertrude Baniszewski, several of her children, and some neighborhood children tortured and eventually murdered Sylvia. She was forced to endure unbelievable atrocities like scalding baths, the carving of words into her body with needles, repeated beatings, eating feces, and worse. Ketchum describes, in graphic detail, what those events might’ve been like, from the point of view of the next door neighbor boy. Teenage Davy lives on a dead-end street and has been hanging out with the same neighborhood kids for his entire childhood. One day, while catching crayfish, he meets Meg, who has just moved with her sister into Davy’s next door neighbor’s home. Meg and Susan’s parents were killed in an auto accident and the only relative to take them in is Ruth, a single mother of three boys. There’s not too much need to go into the plot from here because you all know where it is going. I knew where it was going as well, but that didn’t make it any easier to read.

A few weeks ago, I saw a story on the news about two 48-year old twins in Houston who lived with their mother’s decomposing body after she passed away. I watched in horror as the newscasters described how the grown men frankly told police officers that she had tripped and fell while they were watching the BCS championship and then they just left her there, conscious and able to speak, until she passed a few days later. And the reason that they gave for not calling anyone after her death? Inability to pay for burial expenses. (a judge has not ruled on their mental ability to stand trial as of 5/5/11) What made me think of this story in relation to the book was my wondering about how the hell anyone could ever passively watch someone tortured or slowly dying. Davy knows that Meg is being tortured and I was fascinated with his reasoning about why everything was happening and whether he should do anything about it. Ruth and other perpetrators of such atrocities just be mentally unstable...at least I hope that is the case. But there were/are just so many other people involved in crimes like this--are they all mentally unwell? I’d love to be able to say that a crime as atrocious as this could never happen nowadays but it just did. Angela McAnulty starved, abused, tortured, and eventually killed her own daughter in Eugene, Oregon just last year. There were other people living in the house at the time. HOW? How can these people not report what is going on?

In terms of the book, loosely basing a story on real life events really gives an author an out. I want to say that x,y, and z didn’t seem realistic or probably didn’t/couldn’t happen but I haven’t gone through the notes on the trials so maybe they actually did. I always get a horrible feeling in my stomach when characters tell the police about something and then the police either (1)don’t take them seriously; (2) brush it off; or (3) don’t trust a child and then turn them back over to their abuser. I can’t pretend to know how much work police men and women have but it is horrible to hear of events like this happening and to know that they were absolutely preventable if someone had intervened.

This is a hard book to stomach. I recommend it to no one and everyone at the same time. No one will “enjoy” reading it. A lot of people probably won’t make it through the whole book. It is filled with sick, sick things. But sick things that happened and are still happening, which makes it all the more painful to read. There is a special place in hell for people that torture children.

Let's Go Play at the Adams'
Author: Mendal Johnson
Publication Date: 12/1/84
Publisher: Golden Apple

Blurb (GR): Surely, it was only a game. In the orderly, pleasant world Barbara inhabited, nice children -- and they were nice children -- didn't hold an adult captive.

But what Barbara didn't count on was the heady effect their new-found freedom would have on the children. Their wealthy parents were away in Europe, and in this rural area of Maryland, the next house was easily a quarter of a mile away. The power of adults was in their hands, and they were tempted by it. They tasted it and toyed with it -- their only aim was to test its limits. Each child was consumed by his own individual lust and caught up with the others in sadistic manipulation and passion, until finally, step by step, their grim game strips away the layers of childishness to reveal the vicious psyche, conceived in evil and educated in society's sophisticated violence, that lies always within civilized men.

More than a terrifying horror story, Let's Go Play At The Adams' is a compelling psychological exercise of brooding insights and deadly implications

Review:
I like to be shocked. I like that feeling when I’m reading a book and I think to myself, “there’s no way the author is going to go there…oh, my gosh…he’s going there, OH MY GOSH, WE’RE THERE, so far past acceptability.” That’s why I’m trying to make way through a list of books that readers have told me are “the most disturbing book they’ve ever read.” Let’s Go Play At The Adams’ by Mendal Johnson made nearly every list I’ve looked at so it was an obvious choice for me. Comparisons are made between this work of fictional horror and Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, which has a very similar plot structure but is based on a true crime.  Ketchum’s novel horrified me in so many ways—it was graphic and it felt over-the-top, but I just couldn’t stop reading it. Let’s Go Play felt stronger in terms of writing but I’m just going to say it: I was rather bored.  This is the part of the review where most of you are going to think I’m a lunatic, but I guess I was expecting there to be as much graphic torture in this one as there was in The Girl Next Door, and there absolutely is not.

Whereas Ketchum’s novel focuses on what it could be like for a bystander to see and ultimately participate in such horrific behavior, Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ puts more emphasis on how both the perpetrators and the victim would feel in a captivity and torture situation. The narration remains in third-person throughout but regularly shifts focus from the captors to the captive. In terms of plot, it is very basic.  A brother and sister (very Brady-Bunchily named Bobby and Cindy) are left in the care of a babysitter, Barbara, while their parents are on vacation abroad. Very early on in the vacation, Bobby, Cindy, and three neighborhood kids drug Barbara and then proceed to keep her captive in the house. After about 20 pages of this, that’s when I started to get bored. I was mentally prepared for the worst. I was ready for some horror movie gore and…nothing. Basically, this entire book reads like the kids all wondering how they could do something like this, patting themselves on the back for succeeding at their “game,” and Barbara wondering how these “good kids” could do this to her and how she could be so idiotic as to let it happen.

That’s not to say that there aren’t a few sections that many readers might find hard to read—there is  a sexual abuse scene that was rough and a section near the ending as well, but overall, I spent more time learning  about the mundane trials of having a captive than I did being horrified. Oh, they tied up her ankles instead of her thighs this time. Oh, now she’s on a chair instead of the bed. So now they are taking her to the bathroom and giving her a bath.  I understand the reasoning for this deliberate tactic of the author—what started out as a game was no longer fun.  Part of the allure of staying up late and eating whatever you want as a child is seeing if you can get away with it. When there is no one there to keep it hidden from, it becomes dull.  But imagine if you went to see a horror movie when someone got kidnapped and then most of the movie was spent feeding the captive chicken sandwiches and Coke, switching up the ropes, and the captor wondering if he would get away with it. Who would pay to watch that kind of horror movie? 

While I know crimes like this actually do occur, I felt like the nonchalance of the children was not very believable. Ahh, might as well just do this or that. They seemed to have no regard for or understanding of human life. I know that the value of a life is something foreign to many young children but these “children” were more early to mid-teens. One of them was nearly 17—and the babysitter was only 20.  I suppose I was just surprised because the children in The Girl Next Door were heavily influenced by an absolutely unfit mother or other family situations that might make them more likely to keep things hidden or to partake in abuse. Here, no one’s family life is really mentioned. All the children seem to come from regular families and live in large houses on the water. Maybe it is more disturbing when there seems to be no backstory. I mean, I’ve seen enough of those news reports where flabbergasted neighbors go on about how that nice man could never have done something so horrific. Yeah, right. 

So, in sum, if you’re thinking of taking a trip down horrific lane, I’d start with this one before reading The Girl Next Door. If you can’t make it through this, there is no way in hell you could make it through that.