Today's theme: catching up on Halloween review-writing while anxiously awaiting election results
The Lost Village by Camilla Sten, translated from Swedish by Alex Fleming. A horror novel set in modern-day Sweden. In 1959 an entire village of 900 people vanished - leaving behind no bodies, no footprints, and no trace of where they'd gone. The only clues were one newborn baby, abandoned in the local schoolhouse, and one corpse, that of a woman who'd apparently been stoned to death in the village square.
In 2019, a group of five young filmmakers arrive at the still-abandoned Silvertjärn to investigate the mystery and film a documentary, led by Alice, whose grandmother lost her parents and sisters when the village disappeared. The others are Tone (Alice's best friend, with her own secret connection to Silvertjärn), Emmy (Alice's ex-best friend and there is quite the backstory there), Max (who provided most of the funding and is interested in being more than friends with Alice), and Robert (Emmy's partner and kinda just there to provide another body). In appropriate horror tradition, Silvertjärn mysteriously renders cellphones unuseable and the only way in or out is a long, nearly overgrown dirt path. In other words, once the five arrive, there's no way of getting help from the outside. Weird stuff immediately begins to happen: muffled voices, half-seen glimpses of silhouettes, rotted buildings collapsing around them. Is it paranoia from being so isolated? One of the five fucking with the others? Ghosts of the vanished? The cause of the disappearance, come to claim more victims? Or something very human and non-paranormal, but using the empty buildings to stalk the five?
In between the chapters set in 2019, flashbacks from the POV of Alice's grandmother's family show Silvertjärn in 1959 in the months leading up to the disappearance and slowly revealing exactly what happened. There's a nicely creepy solution, and one that proved satisfyingly difficult to guess ahead of time.
First of all: the entire premise of this book is self-evidently silly. There is no way nearly a thousand people disappear from a Western country in the 1950s and said country doesn't flip its shit attempting to find those people, or that such an event could be half-forgotten and degrade into a generic interesting factoid and not be, like, the most famous event in history. I mean, people still can't shut up about the Roanoke Colony, and that was a) in the 1500s, b) only 100 people, and c) has a fairly obvious answer. But it doesn't really matter; plenty of horror has a silly premise and still manages to be perfectly effective! One you accept the whole 'lost village' thing, The Lost Village has some very creepy scares.
It is also incredibly femslashy. So much so, in fact, that I spent a significant portion of the book convinced that Alice and Tone were current partners and Alice and Emmy were ex's, and in neither case just in the friend sense. I mean, here's Alice describing the tension between her and Emmy:
“Alice, we need to talk,” she says, then sits down cross-legged on the cobblestones. She does it smoothly, in a single movement. She never used to be so agile. She used to be stiff and a little lazy, slow in the mornings and energized by night; used to yawn like a cat, wide-mouthed and red-tongued.
How many times have we eaten breakfast together? One hundred? One thousand? Her with hair wet post-shower, like now, me with yesterday’s makeup still clinging to my eyelashes. But this time my face is bare, and hers is closed.
SUPER PLATONIC, I ALWAYS THINK ABOUT MY FRIENDS' TONGUES.
Overall, The Lost Village is a good source of page-turning chills and thrills, but also the kind of book where you're likely to forget what happened as soon as you finish it. It's a popcorn movie in horror novel form, but hey - sometimes that's exactly what you want.
Note: there are two characters with mental illnesses (one with severe autism, one with a psychotic disorder), who suffer due to the prejudices of those around them. I thought it was handled better than you'd expect from a trashy genre novel, but one of them dies violently, and I respect anyone not wanting to read it for that reason.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand.A horror novel structured like an episode of VH1's 'Behind the Music'. I suppose you could call it an epistolary novel, if you stretch the term to cover not only letters and journals but also recorded interviews. Said interviews concern events that happened during the summer of 1972, when folk revival band Windhollow Faire rented a rural English manor hall to record their second album, immediately after which their lead singer mysteriously and permanently disappeared. Various people give their version of events, from the surviving members of the band to various girlfriends and ex's, the band's manager, a music journalist, and a local kid with dreams of starting a photography career. The interviews come from decades after the actual events (at an unspecified date but presumably sometime around 2015, when Wylding Hall was published), which gives much of mood of the book - it's drenched in nostalgia, a group of middle-aged people looking back to the moment when they were the most famous, the most successful, the hottest, the most *alive* they would ever be. This theme is laid out for the reader right on the first page:
And of course, everyone was so young. Julian was eighteen. So was Will. Ashton and Jon were, what? Nineteen, maybe twenty. Lesley had just turned seventeen. I was the elder statesman at all of twenty-three.
Ah, those were golden days. You’re going to say I’m tearing up here in front of the camera, aren’t you? I don’t give a fuck. They were golden boys and girls, that was a golden summer, and we had the Summer King.
And we all know what happens to the Summer King.
As you might guess from that reference, the strange things that begin to happen at Wylding Hall concern British folklore. (A lot of people seem to be describing Wylding Hall as a ghost story, but it's quite obviously folk horror.) The doomed Julian becomes obsessed with recording his own version of Thrice Toss These Oaken Ashes, his bedroom fills with Tudor-era books on magic and medieval jewel boxes, there's an ancient barrow on the hall's grounds, a local custom concerning the hunt of the wrens, time behaves strangely, rooms in the hall appear and disappear, and some people see a beautiful young woman whom no one else can recall. It all adds up to an ambiguous but creepy ending.
One problem for me was that, for the mood of Wylding Hall to work, you really need to believe in that image of "golden boys and girls", of a halcyon summer, as another character describes it. And it's obviously my own biases, but I just can't take a folk band seriously as the epitome of cool. I wasn't alive in 1971, so perhaps I'm underestimating the appeal, but, like, here's an example from when the band visits a local pub: "She dressed sharp, too-long skirts and dresses, lace-up boots and flowy scarves, all kinds of shiny bits and bobs. Hippie royalty, we were. [...] Her scarf was printed with peacock feathers, and she had on earrings made from peacock feathers". And this is very popular with a bunch of elderly regulars in a small town? Look, I sometimes dress like a Ren Faire reject myself and own peacock feather earrings in multiple colors, so I get the attraction, but I'm not under the illusion that I'm impressing anyone with my style choices. Every time a character tried to emphasize how Windhollow Faire was the height of rock-and-roll glory, I alternatively giggled or rolled my eyes. Which presumably did not help to build the atmosphere Hand was going for.
Still, I assume that most people will not have this problem, and Hand does do an excellent job of building a haunted, heavy sense of dread. A really lovely, skillful take on the horror genre, with some absolutely beautiful writing.
BREAKING NEWS: THERE IS A NEW BENJAMIN JANUARY BOOK IN THREE WEEKS! AND IT'S SET IN NYC! I AM SO EXCITED. House of the Patriarch by Barbara Hambly. I would link to somewhere better than Amazon, but it appears to be limited to ebook form until January. This entry was originally posted at https://brigdh.dreamwidth.org/589838.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
In 2019, a group of five young filmmakers arrive at the still-abandoned Silvertjärn to investigate the mystery and film a documentary, led by Alice, whose grandmother lost her parents and sisters when the village disappeared. The others are Tone (Alice's best friend, with her own secret connection to Silvertjärn), Emmy (Alice's ex-best friend and there is quite the backstory there), Max (who provided most of the funding and is interested in being more than friends with Alice), and Robert (Emmy's partner and kinda just there to provide another body). In appropriate horror tradition, Silvertjärn mysteriously renders cellphones unuseable and the only way in or out is a long, nearly overgrown dirt path. In other words, once the five arrive, there's no way of getting help from the outside. Weird stuff immediately begins to happen: muffled voices, half-seen glimpses of silhouettes, rotted buildings collapsing around them. Is it paranoia from being so isolated? One of the five fucking with the others? Ghosts of the vanished? The cause of the disappearance, come to claim more victims? Or something very human and non-paranormal, but using the empty buildings to stalk the five?
In between the chapters set in 2019, flashbacks from the POV of Alice's grandmother's family show Silvertjärn in 1959 in the months leading up to the disappearance and slowly revealing exactly what happened. There's a nicely creepy solution, and one that proved satisfyingly difficult to guess ahead of time.
First of all: the entire premise of this book is self-evidently silly. There is no way nearly a thousand people disappear from a Western country in the 1950s and said country doesn't flip its shit attempting to find those people, or that such an event could be half-forgotten and degrade into a generic interesting factoid and not be, like, the most famous event in history. I mean, people still can't shut up about the Roanoke Colony, and that was a) in the 1500s, b) only 100 people, and c) has a fairly obvious answer. But it doesn't really matter; plenty of horror has a silly premise and still manages to be perfectly effective! One you accept the whole 'lost village' thing, The Lost Village has some very creepy scares.
It is also incredibly femslashy. So much so, in fact, that I spent a significant portion of the book convinced that Alice and Tone were current partners and Alice and Emmy were ex's, and in neither case just in the friend sense. I mean, here's Alice describing the tension between her and Emmy:
“Alice, we need to talk,” she says, then sits down cross-legged on the cobblestones. She does it smoothly, in a single movement. She never used to be so agile. She used to be stiff and a little lazy, slow in the mornings and energized by night; used to yawn like a cat, wide-mouthed and red-tongued.
How many times have we eaten breakfast together? One hundred? One thousand? Her with hair wet post-shower, like now, me with yesterday’s makeup still clinging to my eyelashes. But this time my face is bare, and hers is closed.
SUPER PLATONIC, I ALWAYS THINK ABOUT MY FRIENDS' TONGUES.
Overall, The Lost Village is a good source of page-turning chills and thrills, but also the kind of book where you're likely to forget what happened as soon as you finish it. It's a popcorn movie in horror novel form, but hey - sometimes that's exactly what you want.
Note: there are two characters with mental illnesses (one with severe autism, one with a psychotic disorder), who suffer due to the prejudices of those around them. I thought it was handled better than you'd expect from a trashy genre novel, but one of them dies violently, and I respect anyone not wanting to read it for that reason.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand.A horror novel structured like an episode of VH1's 'Behind the Music'. I suppose you could call it an epistolary novel, if you stretch the term to cover not only letters and journals but also recorded interviews. Said interviews concern events that happened during the summer of 1972, when folk revival band Windhollow Faire rented a rural English manor hall to record their second album, immediately after which their lead singer mysteriously and permanently disappeared. Various people give their version of events, from the surviving members of the band to various girlfriends and ex's, the band's manager, a music journalist, and a local kid with dreams of starting a photography career. The interviews come from decades after the actual events (at an unspecified date but presumably sometime around 2015, when Wylding Hall was published), which gives much of mood of the book - it's drenched in nostalgia, a group of middle-aged people looking back to the moment when they were the most famous, the most successful, the hottest, the most *alive* they would ever be. This theme is laid out for the reader right on the first page:
And of course, everyone was so young. Julian was eighteen. So was Will. Ashton and Jon were, what? Nineteen, maybe twenty. Lesley had just turned seventeen. I was the elder statesman at all of twenty-three.
Ah, those were golden days. You’re going to say I’m tearing up here in front of the camera, aren’t you? I don’t give a fuck. They were golden boys and girls, that was a golden summer, and we had the Summer King.
And we all know what happens to the Summer King.
As you might guess from that reference, the strange things that begin to happen at Wylding Hall concern British folklore. (A lot of people seem to be describing Wylding Hall as a ghost story, but it's quite obviously folk horror.) The doomed Julian becomes obsessed with recording his own version of Thrice Toss These Oaken Ashes, his bedroom fills with Tudor-era books on magic and medieval jewel boxes, there's an ancient barrow on the hall's grounds, a local custom concerning the hunt of the wrens, time behaves strangely, rooms in the hall appear and disappear, and some people see a beautiful young woman whom no one else can recall. It all adds up to an ambiguous but creepy ending.
One problem for me was that, for the mood of Wylding Hall to work, you really need to believe in that image of "golden boys and girls", of a halcyon summer, as another character describes it. And it's obviously my own biases, but I just can't take a folk band seriously as the epitome of cool. I wasn't alive in 1971, so perhaps I'm underestimating the appeal, but, like, here's an example from when the band visits a local pub: "She dressed sharp, too-long skirts and dresses, lace-up boots and flowy scarves, all kinds of shiny bits and bobs. Hippie royalty, we were. [...] Her scarf was printed with peacock feathers, and she had on earrings made from peacock feathers". And this is very popular with a bunch of elderly regulars in a small town? Look, I sometimes dress like a Ren Faire reject myself and own peacock feather earrings in multiple colors, so I get the attraction, but I'm not under the illusion that I'm impressing anyone with my style choices. Every time a character tried to emphasize how Windhollow Faire was the height of rock-and-roll glory, I alternatively giggled or rolled my eyes. Which presumably did not help to build the atmosphere Hand was going for.
Still, I assume that most people will not have this problem, and Hand does do an excellent job of building a haunted, heavy sense of dread. A really lovely, skillful take on the horror genre, with some absolutely beautiful writing.
BREAKING NEWS: THERE IS A NEW BENJAMIN JANUARY BOOK IN THREE WEEKS! AND IT'S SET IN NYC! I AM SO EXCITED. House of the Patriarch by Barbara Hambly. I would link to somewhere better than Amazon, but it appears to be limited to ebook form until January. This entry was originally posted at https://brigdh.dreamwidth.org/589838.html. Please comment there using OpenID.