"It's so hard, living in the devil's playground . . ."
(I started writing this last night; then got distracted partway through; hope everyone had a Happy Halloween or a sensational Samhain, as the case may be, and yay for a full moon on this particular holiday!)
They’re playing only Halloween appropriate music on the local music show tonight, which says something about the depth of musical talent in such a small area and the inclinations of the local artists, that a few dozen bands can easily fill two hours of music w/one song each given such a theme. And then there’s Gram Rabbit, & to a lesser extent Shawn Mafia, a majority of whose songs would probably be appropriate, and lol, a Shawn Mafia song just came on, The Devil Song, “What you gonna do, whatcha gonna do, sweet darling, when the devil comes looking for you?”; and heh, now a second one, “Death in D Major”)(and lol again, then there was news, and we had a visit from Nipty and Nipster {our names for them, I dunno their real names, but they like to nip, therefore their names}, Patches' two puppies next door [we don't know what happened to Patches; she disappeared in late Spring] who are less than a year old but already as big as Marley, and I had to take them back and put them in their yard, and when I get back, Gram Rabbit, "The Devil's Playground").
Finished reading “The Red Tree” this afternoon, then took a nap for a little over an hour that seemed like several, and woke to the canines barking at something outside and Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” on the radio, which seemed quite appropriate for what I had been reading. I think I had been dreaming about writing an extended review of the book, and then lay back down and proceeded to keep writing the review in my head once I established there was nothing serious going on w/the dogs, and somehow finished it before the song was over. It’s not a very long song, so I must’ve been really nearly done in my dream, and still half dreaming when I first woke up. This was followed by the song (guessing at the title) “You’re Never There”, which is absurdly appropriate, and two more pre-local music songs (especially apt, ?"All Good Things Come to an End"?, which had me convinced that my state of mind was interpreting everything to be relevant to the book. which is sort of what you might get if you placed a bitingly angry, deeply grieving and deeply depressed lesbian narrator into an updated combination of Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" and one of Lovecraft's New England stories (gender and orientation noted only due to the male-centricness of those stories--downright sexism in Lovecraft). It's also a ghost story, thought there may or may not be any "real" ghosts in it. Anyway, after my last entry, I figure I owe y'all a cut, plus, I can't really discuss this as I'd like to w/out spoilers. So, be warned, many spoilers ahead. And I no longer remember my dream review, so you'll get something lesser.
This is a spooky book where you never quite know what's real -- It's ostensibly the journal of author Sarah Crowe, haunted by her lover's suicide, who rents a small house in rural Rhode Island in an effort to finish a contracted novel. But there's more than a little uncertainty about whether the manuscript that shows up on her editor's desk weeks after her apparent suicide is actually by her, and if it is, whether she's being haunted by more than grief and loss, or going crazy, or both (and if she's going crazy,at what point does her account cease being reliable?). And to the extent it is her journal and she is seeing things accurately, how much is she embellishing, since at one point she says she made up half of a dream she wrote while writing (or is she lying when she says this, and why?). She finds a manuscript in the basement (or, to be precise, just out from under the house through a door decorated w/myriad religous symbols into a cavern that extends outward from the basement) that purports to be a book a previous, now decased due to suicide, tenant of the house wrote about the supposedly haunted giant red oak on the property. Then there's another boarder, Constance, who may or may not be real (tho she is mentioned in the editor's framing story, a fact I forgot while reading the book, but which still doesn't entirely settle the question), and if she is real, might be simply another artist or the ghost of Sarah's lover Amanda or the ghost of the lover of another previous tenant who went on a killing spree about 80 years back, or some sort of changeling or some non-human entity. Constance finds a short story (and an outstanding & haunting short story it is in its own right) that appears to have been written by Sarah and dedicated to Amanda during her time at the house, but which Amanda has no memory of writing. There's lots of local folklore mixed in, some of which might be really real (real as in real world folklore, not novel folklore, I have to check this later)(and the tree in the novel was inspired by a real-this world real-tree).
Ghosts abound in the story -- Sarah constantly dreams of Amanda, and at times one wonders if the dream Amanda is the *real* Amanda trying to communicate, or warn, and at other times it seems to be an apparition sent by the possibly demonic tree or a servant of it or the tree itself taking Amanda's form; there's a ghost Sarah saw when she was young, there's a ghostly half-human figure seen by Sarah and Amanda, there's the ghost of his dead lover seen by the possible (probable? his account isn't entirely reliable either) serial killer, who is killing on what he thinks is her behalf, another former tenant of the house recounts seeing the ghost of his dead wife and hearing her voice, Constance saw an apparition from past days and the apparation saw her, and as mentioned, I was at several points unsure of whether Constance herself is a ghost, and Sarah is certainly haunted by Amanda's memory.
The land itself seems haunted, full of timeslips and sudden distortions of distance, perspective and direction.
All of this comes together in a boil of mounting anger and frustration and despair and growing unease and increasing tension and several scare the heck out of you moments, along with some of the best dreamscapes you're likely to see. There's not much "action" here but a lot happens and it's not slow and the sense of menace and dread and it's hard to know which is more terrifying that the author is simply losing her mind or that she's being slowly cut off from the rest of the world by something that feeds off of her blood and grief and fear.
Also, great sensual depiction of the landscape and the characters and general wonderful atmosphere.
Brilliantly written book, perfect for this time of year.
They’re playing only Halloween appropriate music on the local music show tonight, which says something about the depth of musical talent in such a small area and the inclinations of the local artists, that a few dozen bands can easily fill two hours of music w/one song each given such a theme. And then there’s Gram Rabbit, & to a lesser extent Shawn Mafia, a majority of whose songs would probably be appropriate, and lol, a Shawn Mafia song just came on, The Devil Song, “What you gonna do, whatcha gonna do, sweet darling, when the devil comes looking for you?”; and heh, now a second one, “Death in D Major”)(and lol again, then there was news, and we had a visit from Nipty and Nipster {our names for them, I dunno their real names, but they like to nip, therefore their names}, Patches' two puppies next door [we don't know what happened to Patches; she disappeared in late Spring] who are less than a year old but already as big as Marley, and I had to take them back and put them in their yard, and when I get back, Gram Rabbit, "The Devil's Playground").
Finished reading “The Red Tree” this afternoon, then took a nap for a little over an hour that seemed like several, and woke to the canines barking at something outside and Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” on the radio, which seemed quite appropriate for what I had been reading. I think I had been dreaming about writing an extended review of the book, and then lay back down and proceeded to keep writing the review in my head once I established there was nothing serious going on w/the dogs, and somehow finished it before the song was over. It’s not a very long song, so I must’ve been really nearly done in my dream, and still half dreaming when I first woke up. This was followed by the song (guessing at the title) “You’re Never There”, which is absurdly appropriate, and two more pre-local music songs (especially apt, ?"All Good Things Come to an End"?, which had me convinced that my state of mind was interpreting everything to be relevant to the book. which is sort of what you might get if you placed a bitingly angry, deeply grieving and deeply depressed lesbian narrator into an updated combination of Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" and one of Lovecraft's New England stories (gender and orientation noted only due to the male-centricness of those stories--downright sexism in Lovecraft). It's also a ghost story, thought there may or may not be any "real" ghosts in it. Anyway, after my last entry, I figure I owe y'all a cut, plus, I can't really discuss this as I'd like to w/out spoilers. So, be warned, many spoilers ahead. And I no longer remember my dream review, so you'll get something lesser.
This is a spooky book where you never quite know what's real -- It's ostensibly the journal of author Sarah Crowe, haunted by her lover's suicide, who rents a small house in rural Rhode Island in an effort to finish a contracted novel. But there's more than a little uncertainty about whether the manuscript that shows up on her editor's desk weeks after her apparent suicide is actually by her, and if it is, whether she's being haunted by more than grief and loss, or going crazy, or both (and if she's going crazy,at what point does her account cease being reliable?). And to the extent it is her journal and she is seeing things accurately, how much is she embellishing, since at one point she says she made up half of a dream she wrote while writing (or is she lying when she says this, and why?). She finds a manuscript in the basement (or, to be precise, just out from under the house through a door decorated w/myriad religous symbols into a cavern that extends outward from the basement) that purports to be a book a previous, now decased due to suicide, tenant of the house wrote about the supposedly haunted giant red oak on the property. Then there's another boarder, Constance, who may or may not be real (tho she is mentioned in the editor's framing story, a fact I forgot while reading the book, but which still doesn't entirely settle the question), and if she is real, might be simply another artist or the ghost of Sarah's lover Amanda or the ghost of the lover of another previous tenant who went on a killing spree about 80 years back, or some sort of changeling or some non-human entity. Constance finds a short story (and an outstanding & haunting short story it is in its own right) that appears to have been written by Sarah and dedicated to Amanda during her time at the house, but which Amanda has no memory of writing. There's lots of local folklore mixed in, some of which might be really real (real as in real world folklore, not novel folklore, I have to check this later)(and the tree in the novel was inspired by a real-this world real-tree).
Ghosts abound in the story -- Sarah constantly dreams of Amanda, and at times one wonders if the dream Amanda is the *real* Amanda trying to communicate, or warn, and at other times it seems to be an apparition sent by the possibly demonic tree or a servant of it or the tree itself taking Amanda's form; there's a ghost Sarah saw when she was young, there's a ghostly half-human figure seen by Sarah and Amanda, there's the ghost of his dead lover seen by the possible (probable? his account isn't entirely reliable either) serial killer, who is killing on what he thinks is her behalf, another former tenant of the house recounts seeing the ghost of his dead wife and hearing her voice, Constance saw an apparition from past days and the apparation saw her, and as mentioned, I was at several points unsure of whether Constance herself is a ghost, and Sarah is certainly haunted by Amanda's memory.
The land itself seems haunted, full of timeslips and sudden distortions of distance, perspective and direction.
All of this comes together in a boil of mounting anger and frustration and despair and growing unease and increasing tension and several scare the heck out of you moments, along with some of the best dreamscapes you're likely to see. There's not much "action" here but a lot happens and it's not slow and the sense of menace and dread and it's hard to know which is more terrifying that the author is simply losing her mind or that she's being slowly cut off from the rest of the world by something that feeds off of her blood and grief and fear.
Also, great sensual depiction of the landscape and the characters and general wonderful atmosphere.
Brilliantly written book, perfect for this time of year.