Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix

 

Grady Hendrix has a new book out and it is, as I would expect, great. If there is a contemporary author I can count on for a good time, it's him.

Set in the early seventies, it takes place in an old Southern manse that has been converted into a discreet Home for unwed mothers. Our main character is renamed "Fern" upon admittance to strict Miss Wellwood's Home. Since having a child out of wedlock is considered shameful and their families don't want them to be considered "loose," "bad," "neurotic," or in a word, wayward, the young women are forbidden from providing personal information that would give away their identities. Still, they connect over astrological signs, birth stories, and complaints about the bland food. One of the true horrors is reading about the seventies cuisine:

"Salads were always on the table[...]"

 -- so far, so good, but it continues: 

"[...] hot dog salad, tuna mushroom salad, cooked cabbage with a can of Campbell's cheddar cheese soup poured on top." 

That last one is a crime against humanity. 

Aside from indigestion, Witchcraft is comparatively light on scares. Fern and her new friends visit the library bookmobile, where the kindly librarian introduces them to How to be a Groovy Witch. From this old paperback they are introduced to concepts of witchcraft, which allow them a way to fight against the constraints of Wellwood's Home but also entwine them with powerful forces beyond their comprehension. 

The power of libraries! 

-Michael G. 

Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra

 

A woman is awake in the middle of the night. It is just her and her children in their home. She hears a thud. She knows every creak of every board and that sound came from where a tall person would bump their head coming up the stairs if they don't know the house well. They aren't alone. 

Nightwatching is the stuff of nightmares, and the first 150 pages are incredibly taut with suspense. Sierra alternates between short chapters of present tense and flashback, and I never felt that the flashback sequences detracted from the plot. Chapter by chapter, she is building a story not just of a home invasion, but what it is like to be a woman not believed. 

Then the narrative really sinks into that theme, to a degree that slows down the plot and my interest wavered. It became repetitive. The final third of the book picks up in action, delivering a climax the reader wants. 

It is a very neatly constructed thriller, worth it for the first 150 pages alone. I read it in just a couple of sittings over the course of two days. 

- Michael G. 

Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon

 

A painter, his wife, and their teenage daughter move out to the country for a new start, landing in the idyllic New England village of Cornwall Coombe. After a summer restoring their 300-year home and getting to know their neighbors, it's time for the harvest festival! But what it entails is more than square dancing and a husking bee, and much more serious...

In folk horror, you usually have a naive outsider, like Ned Constantine and his family in Harvest Home, entering a rural setting and encountering the superstitions of the people that live in that isolated place. It's usually a beautiful setting, with a strong sense of community and tradition. What seem like remnants of a bygone era, like folk songs, dances, and symbols, are seen as eccentric. And there's a comforting draw to all of this, at first. Isn't it nice, isn't it quaint, isn't it good to be so connected to nature? Yes, the nearest hospital is pretty far, but Widow Fortune seems to have an herbal remedy for anything that ails ya (including asthma). It seems like a good place to bring up your children. Fresh air! Horseback riding! Polite youngsters who value hard work! Hallucinogenic mead!? Secret rituals in the woods!?!

But if you don't fully respect the old ways, look out! Dread builds as conflict increases between modernity and the surviving pagan practices. What you thought was dead and gone is actually alive and well, and it is not going anywhere. 

-Michael G. 

Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman

 

My mom and I read the Best American Short Stories edition from 2006 together this year. While they were all excellent, one called "Self-Reliance" stood out. It was by an author neither of us had read before: Edith Pearlman. In this exquisitely nuanced story, a woman faces death head on. It is the gorgeous kind of story my mother felt compelled to share among our family like a particularly virulent cold. 

It was so good we had to read more, so the rest of the year we've spent reading Pearlman's short story collection Binocular Vision, indulging ourselves with one or two stories a week like literary bon bons. Each story is unique, holding within it some nugget of surprise. Another surprise: There's only one available copy in the MLC and it lives right here in Ferguson. 

Pearlman is an observer and fabricator of human interiors. Her focus is contained: Individuals living mostly quiet, regular lives. Sure, there's an attempted kidnapping, but generally nothing very splashy occurs outside of a little incest, shoplifting seniors, and extramarital affairs (both consummated and not). How do people live? What choices make a life, and importantly, how do we relate to other people? How can you explain the fire that billows up from a spark between two strangers? These are the questions she keeps asking. 

There is frequently a tension between the comfort of self-reliance with its imagined security, and the complicated, unexpected messiness of bonding. "How satisfying domestic life was," thinks a retired bachelor, "When you could shut the door on it at the end of the evening and cross the hall and then shut a second door, your own." 

A nanny with a past agrees: "What she wanted [...] was a life alone, with a family at fingertip distance." Not necessarily her family, but a family. Pearlman depicts plenty of loving biological families but also the beauty of "chosen family." The people we're drawn to don't always make sense: the aforementioned bachelor and a fierce teen immigrant; a bureaucrat and an artist; an innkeeper and a diplomat's child. 

Regardless of how they bond, Pearlman's characters are united by their need for connection.

-Michael G.

Bluebeard's Castle by Anna Biller

 

All senses are alive in Anna Biller's retelling of the French folktale Bluebeard. You can hear the soundtrack, visualize the variously form-fitting and filmy gowns, smell the cognac, feel the purring body of her white Persian cat--Oh, and thrill to la passion!

Biller is a filmmaker, and she effortlessly translates her cinematic language into beautiful prose. Hitchcock and the leading ladies of the forties and fifties lend style and glamor and the giallo genre adds a splash of color and sex. Biller loves describing the way the characters dress (their "costumes") and she's gifted at it. See below for an image from her feature film The Love Witch. 

Judith is a successful Gothic Romance novelist who is swept off her feet (figuratively and literally) by a handsome stranger. After a weekend of passion they are swiftly married and honeymoon in Paris before buying a crumbling castle in the country. Her new husband, Gavin, is passionate and adoring but...not always. Judith is enraptured with him but increasingly afraid of his brooding secrecy and explosive temper. If this sounds like Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, that is intentional. As Biller writes on her blog: 

"Although I’m once again working in a defunct genre and style (my most recent stylistic reference is Rebecca, written in 1938), for some reason the text doesn’t read as stylistically outdated the way my films do, even though I was equally inspired by Gothic fiction written in the 1790s as in the 1930s. I think this is because we all still enjoy language and stories from many different time periods, whereas most people who watch movies are over-saturated with the style of the current time."

And while Bluebeard's Castle is nearly breathless with romance and desire, it also punctures that with sly, dark humor, as in this line of the first chapter:

"She remembered the day they met, and the way he had looked at her, and how it had filled her with a mad ecstasy, which in retrospect had been a nervous breakdown." 

Or this similarly structured sentence from much later:

"But aside from the demon in her head, and her frequent nightmares, and her excessive drinking, and her insomnia, she was happy and productive."

There is this tension throughout: How much will Biller adhere Judith's story with the ones she loves to read, watch, and tell? Is the sexy/scary Gavin a flawed but ultimately romantic hero? Or is he actually just abusive and dangerous? And how much ambiguity can Judith take? She vacillates often throughout the novel, driving everyone around her batty, but it's this uncertainty, the tension between desire and fear, that make this a fascinating page turner and ultimately, a timely and harrowing examination of what it means to be a woman in love with a dangerous man. 

And it's worth mentioning: It's an absolutely gorgeous book! The cover is a great homage to the Gothic pulp novels and the front and back flaps include stunning photographs.  

Samantha Robinson as the titular Love Witch (2016), which Biller wrote, produced, and directed, as well as designed the production and costumes. 

- Michael G. 

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

 

    Have you ever had regrets? What would've happened had you never given up that sport? Went on the date with the person at the coffee shop? What would've happened had you lived differently?

    These are the types of questions constantly buzzing around Nora's mind, and Matt Haig offers his answer to these questions.

    Nora is a 35 year old woman who's life is in shambles. Everything in her life has fallen apart, from her family life to her work life, and she has no idea what to do. She believes she is all out of options and has decided she is better off dying. After committing this grave act, she finds herself in a library. A library hidden in the space between life and death. It is here where the librarian offers her a choice. Every book has a different story of Nora's life, and she is free to choose any book to experience. Even the smallest decision has its own book. This begins Nora's long journey of self exploration, growth, and healing as she jumps from book to book experiencing many different versions of herself.

    The narrative is 288pages and told in 3rd person, following Nora and her thoughts. It touches on themes of grief, family trauma, identity, depression, and regret among many others, as these topics can silently weigh down on our lives without us even noticing. It consistently challenges us to shift perspective and cultivate resilience so we may realize we are much stronger than we can even imagine. Every moment is an opportunity to take an action true to ourselves, and every action we take has impact. There are an infinite amount of ways our lives can unfold at any given moment, and the only way to learn what those are is to live. This book will drive that lesson home until you realize it's been a house rule your whole life. 

Please feel free the check it out and share your thoughts. It's certainly one I'm adding to my shelf of favorites!

- Leo H

Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth

 

The camptastic exterior of Motherthing I find both attractive and suspect: 

The collage of green-hued horror, the shadowy hand, but most of all the jellied salmon. 

The title transforming "mothering" to the more monstrous Mother/Thing. 

The subject: a couple haunted (in very different ways) by a mother/in law and the promise of a unique recipe for chicken a la king.

How can a book live up to this?

The book begins in an emergency room, where Abby and her husband wait for an update on his mother, who has just cut her wrists in their basement (not conveniently in a bathtub, Abby thinks later). Abby and Ralph are coping by joking about a hot tub of diarrhea, specifically baby diarrhea. It's a lot, and you will either appreciate the dark, sometimes gross sense of humor or you won't. 

The story kept me guessing. What would the balance be between horror and comedy? Humor turns out to be Abby's coping mechanism, one that grows in mania throughout the course of the novel, climaxing in an outrageous work lunch-room interaction. 

I won't say more about the book, other than that I really enjoyed it and the ending surprised me. 

- Michael G. 

Long Island by Colm Tóibín

There is much duplicity in this captivating novel! It seems as if every main - and most of the minor - characters are deceiving someone close to them. This is not consciously manipulative behavior; these are generally well meaning people. 

Colm Toibin's brand new novel - Long Island - is a sequel to his 2009 novel Brooklyn, which was subsequently made into a movie. In this story that takes place in the 1970s, two fishbowl worlds and two cultures are depicted - one in an Irish village, the other a subdivision on Long Island, NY.

Eilis Lacey Fiorello, who in the original novel emigrated to New York City in the 1950s and married into a close, extended Italian family inhabits both of these entrapping worlds. It is her experience around which the larger story develops. A quiet and mostly responsible woman, she has a way of unleashing disruption within her two families, with little insight on the attendant emotional pain she tends to generate.

Tóibín's depiction of the lives in this story brings to mind novels of Edith Wharton in his focus on the dynamic nuances of private, unspoken thoughts that flit between and among people. Characters always seem to be second guessing each other and themselves. There is context to outline the story, while the pace of the novel often slows down. The reader may spend several pages examining the thoughts and suppositions of a character while only a couple of days - or even just a few hours - have passed, and it's riveting. That is one of the gifts of this writer. 

All the drama happens at the beginning and the end of the story, leaving an ending I found satisfying even for its ostensible inconclusiveness. You come to see that all the interpersonal manipulation and deceit of this story is, collectively, people's responses to living in a world where everyone knows too much about each other and there is sometimes too little room to breathe or be true to the self. For these deeper themes I found it compelling reading.  

Reviewed by Marianne W

The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr

It's 1929. Baxter is a pullman porter saving money to go to dental school. Tired and overworked, he does yet another typical train route. Typical until the train gets stranded in the mountains. While this train is stranded, Baxter must continue working, and while one works, one cannot sleep.

A piece of historical fiction told in a third person narrative, we follow the perspective of Baxter. We follow him as the racist microaggressions, overt disrespect, and the fear of being caught with a homoerotic postcard weigh on his mind. One slip and he's fired. And this is all while the sleep deprivation worsens. With all the complaints, secrets, and fears weaving in and out his ears, it's no wonder that the hallucinations begin...

The story does a wonderful job showing the intersectionality of his Black and queer identities during a time period in which both are still faced with prejudice and dehumanization. This is all done through the experiences of being a pullman porter. 

I recommend this book to anyone who likes a bit of historical fiction. Mayr frequently references real life events and customs from the time, and there are a few pictures and diagrams (there's even a works cited page in the back). The narrative voice can be blunt, almost robotic at times, but this is rather a reflection of Baxter's scientific mind. 

Please check out this book if you are interested! I'd be happy to hear your thoughts. Up for days, hungry, and hallucinating: how do you think you would react if a passenger still had the audacity to call you "George"?

- Leo H

Katie by Michael McDowell

 

Prospects aren't exactly cheery for Philo Drax, the daughter of a small-town seamstress in 1871, until a letter arrives from her estranged grandfather. His farm and well-being are being (mis)managed by the villainous Slapes, and he fears for his life. 

Hoping for reconciliation (and potentially an inheritance), she disguises herself as a housemaid and rushes off to rescue her grandfather. But alas, the Slapes have already sunk their grimy claws in too deep and Philo is unable to save him from a horrible death. The Slapes leave with his money and a newfound enemy in Philo.  

Philo's story is an absorbing melodrama but Michael McDowell (who wrote the screenplay for Beetlejuice as well as several novels -- including the incredible Blackwater saga) balances the weight of her story with his depiction of the Slapes. They are stupid, brutal, and scary, none more so than the titular Katie, a psycho psychic with a flair for blunt force trauma. But there is also something undeniably funny in the way he writes their dialogue (truncated and simple, like their minds) and I could not resist being charmed by their simple pleasures (though murderous thieves, they don't splurge on anything but theater).  

Katie shares a bloodline with Victorian penny dreadfuls. This is evidenced by its bloody, sensational plot and evocative historical setting. I particularly enjoyed the depiction of a boarding house that reminded me of the 1937 film Stage Door. It's a setting that is quippy and fun but also sobering in its depiction of what it is like to be a single young woman in New York City in the late 19th century. 

There's also a Pride and Prejudice sort of romance, rather swoony, and one of the saddest murder scenes I've ever read. What I'm trying to say is Katie has just about everything I could want in my entertainment: drama, suspense, romance, gore, humor. Check it out! 

Blessings by Chukwuebuka Ibeh

Family, friendship, love, and secrets… Ibeh brings us a story deeply unwrapping what it means to love, even when everything around you tells you that the love you feel is wrong.

The story revolves around Obiefuna and his journey of self discovery as he grows from a child into a young adult. His life is not without its obstacles, as he discovers quickly he is gay and that his mannerisms are seen as weak and feminine. In Nigeria, these qualities are frowned upon, the roots of their hate deeply ingrained in homophobia. Obiefuna does what any of us would do to survive: he hides these parts of himself.

But one can only hide for so long. His father eventually sends him to a (very rough) boarding school, and it is there where we see many of the books’ events take place. We see Obiefuna’s destruction and evolution, his death and rebirth. There is nothing else to do but adapt when you are thrown to the wolves.

While the story is primarily about Obiefuna, through alternating chapters, we also follow the perspective of his mother, Uzoamaka. We see her deepest inner thoughts as she watches her son change. It is through her that we start to see a different type of love, one that transcends what Obiefuna has always thought he understood. 

Told in third person perspective, the book has an elegantly straightforward voice with a serious tone that still allows for laughs and smiles. It draws us into an attachment for the flawed Obiefuna as his understanding of love is consistently challenged. If you’re anything like me, it’ll also pull out some tears.

It's probably my favorite one so far out of the books I read in 2024, so please check out this book. It's a very beautiful example of how sometimes, the very places that challenge us the most can be the very same places that show us the truest possibilities of what love can be.

- Leo H

Time Before Time by Declan Shalvey and Rory McConville

Tatsuo works for the time traveling smuggling business  known as The Syndicate. He and Nadia, an FBI agent, are now on the run from the The Syndicate after stealing one of their time machines. Thus begins the graphic novel series Time Before Time (you can read the first issue here). 

At first glance it looks like just another time travel book, but a couple of things set it apart:

In the usual time-travel thriller you will see one company or group in charge of all time travel but here they incorporate many different moving parts that make it feel real. In addition to the smuggling Syndicate there is the robot-fearing Arcola Institute and the hypocritical company the Union.  

In most time travel, even with all the tech, they still annoyingly stay in the general same time period. In Time Before Time, they actually use this ability for more than just escaping from people or chasing them, and, even better, they aren't safe even when they do escape one spot because other people have time travel, too, and the writers emphasize that.

The art is stylized, yet still gritty. Character drawings are lanky and action-oriented. They are wildly different from almost every other comic or graphic novel out there.

This, with all the other reasons (which I will not get into detail about due to them being spoilers), make Time Before Time a must-read for all sci-fi fans out there.

- Guest Review by Juvenile Patron Seth B.

Nightblood by T. Chris Martindale

 

If you're in the mood for an action-packed vampire story that is darkly funny, wildly violent, at points crude, and non-stop fun, have I got a recommendation for you!

Chris Stiles is (cue gravelly voiceover) "a Vietnam veteran they couldn't kill" whose dead brother's ghost leads him to a small Indiana town to hunt down some unknown evil. 

Bart and Del are stepbrothers dared to spend the night at the old Danner house, abandoned for almost a century after rumors of a gruesome double homicide. 

They don't find any ghosts, though. They find a walled up vampire! And he's thirsty! And EVIL.  

The book pretty much explodes from there, Stiles unloading bullets from his impressive arsenal and the boys wielding nunchaku and Molotov cocktails while they gather a militia of townsfolk. Martindale writes with gusto and glee and his descriptions are cinematic. See here this vision:

"There was a demon in the road. It stood backlit by hellspawned flame, its wings folding and unfolding restlessly, its impossibly long arms drooped at its sides and reaching all the way to the ankles." The light shifts, and it is revealed to be Chris with billowing overcoat tails and two shotguns. Look out vampires! 

Speaking of which, this is not the book to read if you want sensitive, moody vampires struggling with the ethical dilemma of blood-sucking. These are monsters of insatiable hunger and that's it. Once your friend, girlfriend, or neighbor is turned, the only thing they need is to be staked, beheaded, shot up with silver, or burned. Or all of the above. Often, all of the above. 

I wasn't sure how I'd like Nightblood, to be honest. It's very macho. But it's also a complete blast and well-written and I loved it. I'm thrilled that indie publisher Valancourt Books is re-publishing horror gems from the 70s-90s with their Paperbacks from Hell line and I'm excited to add a few to the library's collection. 

-Michael G.