Book Review: The Accursed, by Joyce Carol Oates

4/5

The tale of an inexplicable and deadly "Curse" that ravages the upper crust of Princeton society in 1905 and 1906, Joyce Carol Oates' newest novel plays with Gothic conventions masterfully.

Between the covers of this book you will find all the tropes -- demon lovers, murderous jealousy, insanity, miscegenation, beckoning apparitions, secret letters, even a dreary fairy kingdom. You will also find an absolutely enormous cast of characters; some are entirely fictional, like the august but sorely afflicted Slade family; others "real," like Woodrow Wilson (at that time the besieged President of Princeton University); ex-U.S. President Grover Cleveland; and penurious Socialist writer Upton Sinclair. What I did not expect to find was a darkly satirical commentary on Christian piety, ivory tower backstabbing, gaping race and class and gender divisions, the rise of utopian Socialism, and, of course, the "Gothic novel" itself.

Asserting itself as the first true account of these dark years, The Accursed is the patchwork manuscript of amateur historian M.W. van Dyck II. Himself a relation of a "Cursed" family, he presents with copious commentary a series of excerpts from  journals, letters, newspapers -- even a coded diary, whose code he has broken himself -- written by various victims and bystanders and detailing the long months of the "Curse." Thanks to his family connections, van Dyck finds himself  "privy to many materials unavailable to other historians." These documents, he claims, reveal the true origins of the strange and horrible series of events that seem to begin with the shocking abduction of the innocent and beloved Annabel Slade from the church the very moment her wedding vows are sealed. In his Author's Note, van Dyck declares his passion for the project:

I know that a historian should be "objective" -- but I am so passionately involved in this chronicle, and so eager to expose . . .<this> tragic series of events . . . <that> it is very difficult for me to retain a calm, let alone a scholarly, tone.

Oates' appalling tale of mysterious disappearances, gory murders, and unholy apparitions unfolds over nearly 700 pages and more narrative voices than you can count on one hand, all filtered through van Dyck's editorial influence and fevered imagination. In that way, The Accursed begs the same sorts of questions as James' classic psychological Gothic The Turn of the Screw: were supernatural entities the cause of these brutal and tragic events, or simply overwrought imaginations? In Oates' version of the game, this unreliable narrator trope is magnified by the fact of an excitable author/editor exhuming and interpreting the stories of other, equally excitable, and in some cases quite possibly insane, Princeton residents.

Even putting aside van Dyck's overly enthused editorial intentions, whose account is the reader meant to trust? Woodrow Wilson's? Probably not, since his portions are the quintessence of dramatic irony: though he sees himself as a victim, amusingly, he exposes himself as a whining, entitled, hypochondriac hypocrite in his notes and letters. Perhaps the author of the coded diary, patrician invalid Adelaide Burr -- who bears a striking (and self-referential) resemblance to that woman with the dreadful yellow wallpaper? Winston Slade, deeply respected reverend and beloved patriarch of the family hardest hit by the "Curse"? Winston's sorely afflicted grandchildren? Newspaper accounts of a plague of snakes at a girls' school? Yeah . . . maybe not. But together they form a rollercoaster of a story more entertaining and convoluted than anything Mrs. Radcliffe ever dreamed up. (On a side note: Oates pokes hilarious holes in the reputations of other historical characters than Wilson: Grover Cleveland is a bloated glutton who at one point in the story actually gets stuck while leaning out an open window; Jack London is a barbaric, slavering Id; and Upton Sinclair something of a sentimental sad-sack.)

When a fellow reader asked me if I "thought there was really a 'Curse'" I was brought up short. I couldn't find an easy answer, because, of course, there both is and isn't a curse in The Accursed. Postmodernism, at least partially, operates with the goal of challenging our constructed concepts of reality; I'm pretty sure Oates' point, with which she pokes at and false piety, misogyny, deeply institutionalized racism and class prejudice, is that our own moral failings make monsters, both real and metaphorical. The lens through which she chooses to get her point across is the funhouse of  the supernatural Gothic . . . if you can't, at some level, buy into the terror of the "Curse," that evil made manifest which punishes her corrupted version of Princeton, you'll also forgo the emotional power of the metaphor. If you can't conceive of both/and, you'll probably lose your way -- and your patience.

Even though I kind of love this crazy book, you will find me in agreement with other critics who have suggested The Accursed could stand to shed about a hundred pages of exhaustive period detail and be a better book for it (hence four stars rather than five). But I wouldn't begin to know where to cut, because even during the moments when I shook my head and thought, "What in the seven hells does all this have to do with the 'Curse'?," I was still vastly entertained. (One magnificent example: the mild, teetotaling, vegetarian Upton Sinclair, excited to meet the legendary Jack London at a Socialist rally, ultimately falls in with London's party for dinner. But poor Sinclair, so out of his element, becomes progressively more horrified by his hero's clay feet as the meal progresses; London's drunken gluttony and vivid white-supremacist declamations finally turn the evening into a bloody free-for-all.)

Do not mistake The Accursed for "merely" a Gothic novel; like a postmodern Northanger Abbey, The Accursed is itself a near-perfect example of the genre -- filled with despoiled innocence, secrets, "unspeakable" acts, suffering and (perhaps) eventual redemption. Still, you know Oates is playing a game (or maybe a long con) with it all. It's a true a postmodern joyride, and will challenge your patience from time to time. But go bravely into the insane level of period detail! Persevere! The crazies are entertaining, the "Curse" is scary, and blood is compulsory. And all (well, most) of the narrative threads are brought together stunningly at the book's end, in a blazing-with-brimstone sermon called "The Covenant," which upends all expectations, and leaves readers pondering the true nature of good and evil, and of our flawed human morality.

Book Review: The Fifty Year Sword, by Mark Z. Danielewski

3.5/5
Prefatory note: I take a perverse pleasure in banging my head up against experimental narratives, have ever since grad school. I nearly wrote my thesis on Ulysses; adore Rushdie; will continue to mourn David Foster Wallace. China Mieville is my literary pinup. It's like . . . well, there's this old joke: Twin boys, one a pessimist and one an optimist, are sent to a psychiatrist because their parents are concerned about their personality extremes. By way of testing, the pessimist is shown a room filled with toys, but, afraid he would break them, immediately burst into tears. The junior optimist, however, was brought to a room filled to the ceiling with stinky, sticky manure. He climbed to the top of the pile and started digging gleefully. When asked why he was so pleased by such an awful task, he shrugged and smiled:“With all this shit, there has to be a pony in there somewhere.” I'm the sucker that can't stop believing in poop-covered ponies. Also the person who feels the sting of defeat if I just give up on difficult books. All of which has almost no bearing on The Fifty Year Sword, except by way of explaining how I got involved with reading Mark Z. Danielewski in the first place.

*******

In The Fifty Year Sword, more objet d'art than book-for-reading, Danielewski once again plays with type and page layout and color, and even texture via pinprick holes in the dust cover. (Are there 50 of them? Maybe 100, as if run all the way through? Perhaps; I didn't count.) I know this edition has been breathlessly awaited by those who couldn't get their hands on TFYS before, it having previously been released only in the Netherlands in 2005 and in a limited run of 2,000 copies in English in 2006. It's also been performed in 2010 and 2011 as a staged Halloween reading with shadow theater, which I imagine is a very cool show.

Danielewski's newest experiment-in-print asks nowhere near the commitment that House of Leaves does, nor is it ultimately as satisfying. (HoL has a pony, but the pile is pretty big. Not to say I didn't appreciate the exercise.) On the other hand, The Fifty Year Sword is far less overwrought: ephemeral like a children's tale (though not a tale for children), structured in a simple yet resonant poetic language. It's also quite slight; though the book-object itself logs in at 284 pages, at least half are loosely related artwork. (The art is all tactile, textural stuff, stitches and rips and cut and wrinkled paper. I'm sure it's really interesting in the original, but photos of these things are not.) This being an MZD work, some pages have only a lone word. Or none. They're calling it a novella, but I read it in one long, fascinated hour.

Ready-made to be told around the fire on Halloween (in an echo of the book itself), TFYS is the story of a story told by an uncanny stranger at an annual small-town Halloween party. Hosted by an ancient local eccentric, with both children and adults in attendance, the soiree this year doubles as the 50th birthday party of the local jezebel, Belinda Kite. Seamstress Chintana (the closest to a protagonist the book has) is in reluctant attendance, since her recent, unhappy divorce was a direct result of Ms. Kite's un(whole)some relationship with her husband. Chintana decides instead to spend the evening hidden away with the kids, for whom a storyteller has been arranged. (Does it matter the children are five orphans? Maybe.) And, after extinguishing the porch lights with his arrival, a "shadow cast by nothing," such a tale he has to tell.

Chintana's thumb begins to prickle ominously as she and the children listen wide-eyed to the mysterious Story Teller's tale of his protracted quest to find a magical weapon-smith, and his eventual acquisition of the Fifty Year Sword -- so named because its violence, no matter when dealt, does not reveal itself until the victim's 50th birthday. (The scene in the sword-maker's shop is particularly deft, both charming and subversive, with some of the most resonant bits of language in the book.)

And, perhaps even more interesting than his words, the Story Teller has something with him: a long, thin black box at his feet . . .  a box with five locks, just waiting to be opened.

Typographic visual games are only lightly applied in TFYS, which complements the style of the story. The important exception is MZD's  use of multi-colored quotation marks, each color indicating a different (but ultimately unknown and unknowable) speaker. This tactic renders dialogue into snippets of language, broken and overlapping, as each "speaker" chimes in. Like a palimpsest, under the postmodern antics there's the suggestion of a Greek chorus, breathlessly narrating events as they unfold beneath our impotent gaze. (Here there are only five in the chorus, one-tenth of the originally designated fifty. Yes, fifty.). This technique creates a mytho-poetic resonance that suits TFYS, at its heart a timelessly creepy little tale of hubris, vengeance, and the ofttimes queasy reality of getting a thing you have secretly wanted.

So here I am again, trying to review something that's as much an art project/performance piece as a book, and I come back to a similar problem I had with  House of Leaves. Sometimes the packaging gets in the way of a good story. Make no mistake, the story(ies) that comprise TFYS are compelling: eerie, sinister and viscerally satisfying in exactly the way fairy tales are. But in this case I feel slightly hoodwinked for paying hardback novel price and getting (at best) a slim novella. I know MDZ fanatics needed this edition on their shelves, but I would have been perfectly satisfied with a slim paperback (although that assumes there will be one). I'd recommend checking it out of the library (hell, you could read it without leaving the library!) and saving the cash for a ticket the (theoretical) next time The Fifty Year Sword is performed. Because that would make for a good Halloween.

Book Review: Elsewhere, by William Peter Blatty

3/5
(This review refers to the 1999 version, included in the anthology 999: Twenty-nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense, not to the 2009 reissue in hardback. I am unsure if there are substantive differences in the text.)

Elsewhere is an eerie little haunted-house story strong on atmospherics and clever dialogue, but one which ultimately disappoints with a pretty stock resolution.

Ambitious real estate agent Joan Freeboard is offered a huge fee if she can sell Elsewhere, a notoriously haunted mansion on an island in the Hudson river. Known as the scene of a particularly gruesome murder-suicide, even the family heirs refuse to live in it, decamping to Italy and putting it on the market.

Joan knows she has to do something to dispel the ridiculous rumors, so in order to clear the house's reputation she hatches a clever PR plan: she retains the services of a psychic, an occult expert from NYU, and her closest friend, award-winning but creatively blocked writer Terence Dare, to spend five days with her at Elsewhere. If all goes well, they can debunk the ghost stories, and Terence can break his dry spell by writing an account of the experiment for a high-profile magazine -- which will also serve as excellent publicity for the house's sale. Win-win, right?

Needless to say, things don't go as planned. But I'll bet you expected that. (At least you did if you've ever read The Haunting of Hill House.)

And that's the real problem with Elsewhere: it's just a bit too predictable to actually be scary. Perhaps that's unfair, since the novella was originally published in 1999 -- earlier than some of the works it ultimately feels derivative of. But if you're up on your contemporary horror, you can see the end coming from miles away. This is especially irritating because, a) we all know Blatty is fully capable of scaring the crap out of readers; and b) because the story's setup seems so obvious you're sure the twist simply can't be what you think it is. And yet.

Elsewhere was a perfectly fine way to while away a Sunday afternoon, and I'm not sorry I read it; I just wish I'd read it before subsequent works made it essentially redundant.
                                    

Book Review: The Horror of Lisa Mannetti

4.5/5 -- MA-LSV

3/5 -- MA-LSV

                    

 (Spoiler warning in full effect.)

This has been a damnably difficult review to write; I read both of these back-to-back a couple of weeks ago, and am still not sure what to make of Mannetti's freaky and deeply disturbing modern gothic. The Gentling Box won the Bram Stoker for Best First Novel in 2008; Deathwatch is made up of two novellas -- Dissolution (a 2010 Stoker nominee for Long Fiction) and Sheila Na Gig. All three tales, though varied in setting, explore similar psychological ground, and some of the themes -- including necromancy, blood sacrifice, possession and (in particular) medical horror and taboo sexual transgressions -- are most unpleasant. As in, "WTF is wrong with Lisa Mannetti?" unpleasant. Of course I intend no insult; from the interviews I've read she seems like a warm and intelligent woman with a quick sense of humor, someone you'd like to chat with over tea or a beer. Which makes these dark, unforgiving, and ultimately rather misogynistic stories all the stranger. But in the horror field, the provocation of, well, horror, in the reader is kind of the point . . . right?

Set in the Romany culture of Hungary and Romania in the 1860s, The Gentling Box is as claustrophobic as a gypsy caravan, and as bone-chilling as an open grave. Through skillful, atmospheric prose, intense research and a wicked imagination, Mannetti recreates a world where fear, superstition and magic still hold sway; impeccably detailed, exotic enough to feel like a dark, bloody fairy tale, this book is definitely not for the squeamish. The Gentling Box is the tragedy of horse-trader Imre, his Romany wife Mimi, and their daughter Lenore. The two women become targets (and in Mimi's case, a meat-sack) for the ghost of Anyeta, Mimi's scheming mother, in life a powerful gypsy witch with a lust for immortality (among other things). Anyeta's power springs from "The Hand of the Dead," a repulsive fetish that grants the possessor power over life and death, and her goal is the acquisition of a fresh body. Anyeta's assault on the family includes poisoning the desperately protective Imre with disease and hallucinations, particularly sexual illusions -- she seduces and mocks him while possessing his wife's body, and curses him with unbearable and humiliating desire for the adolescent Lenore. The more Imre struggles to save his family from Anyeta's foul gypsy curse, the more it  tightens around him, until he's left dying and helpless, faced with an impossible choice. There's no question this deserved a Stoker: The Gentling Box, though unrelievedly dark and dreadful, is ambitious and uniquely haunting.

However, the novellas that make up Deathwatch are more problematic for me. That they again feature wicked women wielding supernatural powers to manipulate men into destroying other women (children, really) is what disturbs and somewhat dismays me. In Dissolution we meet another ghost, the mother of twelve-year-old conjoined twins Abby and Ellie, who seeks to live again through the body(ies) of her daughters. Again the ghost plays manipulative erotic tricks, this time upon the young surgeon  burdened with separating the twins, and to even more disastrous and disgusting results. In Dissolution, the medical/body horror works, but the young doctor's slide into madness and pedophilia plays like a repetitive and far less subtle version of The Gentling Box's horrors. And in Sheila Na Gig, an Irish crone uses ancient fertility magic to keep her family and its fortunes firmly under her control. If I told you her manipulations result in several deaths and an adolescent girl incestuously impregnated, I think that might be enough of the plot with which to make my point.

So here it is: the but-face. You know I love me some horror, the darker and more hopeless the better. I also  love the way Mannetti writes . . . The Gentling Box is unforgettable and alone warrants her a place at the big kids' table. But so far my experience with her work has left me equal parts impressed and repulsed. I think her various violations of the body -- possession, radical surgery, and the twisting of the erotic to make it unpalatable and unnatural -- work, even as they are profoundly disgusting. But I can't say that the repetitive theme of violence done to women by other women  (using men's lust and gullibility as their weapons) is a good look for any writer to be stuck in, let alone a woman. I'm pretty shock-proof, so when something makes me want to throw up on a book, that's news. Dissolution in particular openly crosses a line that is difficult to stomach. I'm no prude, but there were points at which I felt contaminated by the text.

Now . . . is that good horror or not? 

More: House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski

4/5

Okay, so I think I'm finished with this book, if lacking even the remotest textual sense of an ending can be called "finished."

 Lev Grossman, in a recent review of the new David Foster Wallace bio, talks about the genre that DFW helped to birth, and that James Woods referred to (in a review of Zadie Smith's White Teeth) as "hysterical realism." Grossman says:

            

               Wood coined the phrase to describe the big, hyper-inter-connected,
               hyper-detailed, hyper-annotated, novels that Rushdie, Pynchon,  
               DeLillo, DFW and Smith were writing at the time . . ..  Hysterical realism treats
               the world as an infinite network, but we already have an infinite network, the
               Internet, and our nose is rubbed in it on an hourly basis. We don’t need more of
               that—more hysteria. We need novels that help us manage hysteria instead.

It's interesting (or maybe just inevitable) that this branch of postmodernism began to peter out even as the internet was remaking the way we process information. House of Leaves, published in 2000, also tries that sort of remaking . . . in fact, it may represent the genre at its most excessive, with multiple layers of narration, endless footnotes, experiments in typography and page layout, and several appendices that may or may not enhance the reader's experience of the story ("novel" feels like a misnomer).  And of course there are no answers to its endless riddles, aside from the ones the reader wants to see.

Is House of Leaves hysteria inducing, or just a lot of work? I think that depends on how much you enjoy puzzles, or maybe how much time you have to devote to puzzling. I remember reading Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum in the good ol' days pre-Internet, and desperately wanting to look up every historical reference to see if he was pulling my leg or not. Fact was, I enjoyed it immensely without (in fact, it's one of my permanently earmarked desert island tomes, and I never have bothered with that web research now that it's available). I also enjoyed DFW's Infinite Jest when the only stylistic point of reference I had was Nabokov's Pale Fire (yeah, he did the footnote/end-note/gloss thing way back in 1962).

So . . . House of Leaves was good, but not great. Maybe I'd have been more impressed had I read it when its its stylistic quirks were still fresh; maybe I'd care more about putting the reams of clues together if I were writing some dry academic treatise on it. (On the other hand, HoL makes a great deal of indirect and snarky fun of dry academic treatises, so . . . maybe not so much.) Yes, I was amused by the endless invented scholarship; yes, some of Johnny Truant's prose sings like a nightingale; but, much like Nabokov's annotated poem, HoL relies almost completely on the interpretation of a text by an unreliable narrator, taking that conceit one step further to a level of TWO unreliable narrators -- each telling his own story as much as the Navidsons'. And the rub is that the narrative buried deepest in is the most intriguing.

The Navidson Report had me at "bigger on the inside," and the uncanny nature of the great dark void at the center of the house is what really kept me going. I expect the text is intended to be as much a mystery as that inexplicable darkness -- which, ironically, is the only narrative thread with an emotionally satisfying conclusion. I'm not even sure what I'm saying anymore, so I'll leave it at this: 5 big shiny stars for The Navidson Report, which is creepy beyond measure.  3 stars for the rest, which can be both lyrical and amusing, but in the end amounts to an entirely different tale, which is nowhere near as compelling.

Some Observations: House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski

                                                                                      This is a book about an aspiring tattoo artist obsessed with reading a found manuscript 

 (authored by a dead man) 

which analyzes and critiques a documentary made by a family who lived in a house that's much bigger on the inside. (Not nearly as well-appointed as the TARDIS, though.* )

Crappy resolution on those bottom words, but the large one kinda says it all.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this book is all kinds of postmodern weird, using and abusing all the usual suspects: footnotes, more footnotes, footnotes about footnotes, text boxes, strange page layouts, codes, backwards type -- you know the drill. (And if you don't, I wouldn't suggest going anywhere near it.) 

There are in fact pages that look like this:

Also? Lots of quotations in foreign tongues (some translated; others not so much). The word "house" and all its non-English correlates are always printed in blue... Other sections are in red, or in strikethrough

font.

Yes, all the bells and whistles can be distracting, but so far, not too tedious. Granted, I'm only just over halfway through, but I know there's a truly unsettling story buried in here; the bits called "The Navidson Record" are creepy and fascinating . . . and they are keeping me awake much later than they should be. I'll be back with a full review (as if that were even possible!) as soon as I climb out of the abyss. Meanwhile . . .

one more for the road:

* For more about the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), see the beloved and long-running BBC TV series "Doctor Who."

Book Review: Magic For Beginners, by Kelly Link

4.5/5

I love that Kelly Link has made a career out of the short form; it's risky and it's brave, and it's the fabulous and fleeting opposite of the trilogy epidemic* rampant in today's fantasy and paranormal genres.

The stories in  in Magic for Beginners are also fabulous and fleeting, some ethereal and full of dream logic, others quirky and postmodern. I'd have given it a full five stars, but there were two stories ("The Cannon" and "Catskin") that didn't really work for me, perhaps because I find that Link is better when she's injecting magic, melancholy  and her odd brand of whimsy into the everyday, rather than writing entirely in the more dreamlike fairytale vein. I won't dwell, because the rest of the stories are so wonderful I'm half-convinced I must be wrong about those two.  (Also, how great are Shelley Jackson's adorably creepy illustrations? I love the updated Leonardo which graces the cover.)

Most of the stories in Magic for Beginners are about average people in very peculiar situations. "The Hortlak" introduces us to Eric, a young man who works at the All-Night Convenience, an "experiment in retail" on the edge of "Zomburbia." Batu, Eric's co-worker, wants to discover what zombies like to buy, in hopes of creating a whole new market. Unfortunately the zombies, while not dangerous, can't seem to grasp anything more complex than the barter system, and bring in "shiny things, broken things . . . empty soda bottles, handfuls of leaves, sticky dirt and dirty sticks," to trade.  In "Some Zombie Contingency Plans," we meet yet another young man; this one steals art, thinks about zombies, crashes parties, and loves to talk to  strangers about their . . . zombie contingency plans. (There are no actual zombies in this story, but there is this great line: "Art is for people who are not worried about zombies." Think about it.)

It's not all about zombies, though. The titular story is (in part, anyway) about obsessive teenage fans of an ephemeral cult TV show called "The Library," which has "no regular schedule, no credits, and sometimes not even dialogue." In "The Great Divorce" we meet Alan and Lavvie -- he's alive, and she's dead, and they are negotiating their divorce with the help of a medium.

My favorites of all are "The Faery Handbag" and "Stone Animals." In the former, a young woman named Genevieve recounts the tale of a missing family heirloom: her Grandmother Zofia's "huge, black, and kind of hairy" handbag, which contains an entire town, a savage beast, her grandfather Rustan (he comes out to visit with Zofia every decade or so), and finally, Genevieve's own boyfriend, Jake. "Stone Animals" upends the classic haunted house story when a family moves into a beautiful old house, only to find that their things -- soap, flatware, the television, the cat, and their youngest child -- have become haunted. There is also a plague of rabbits on their front lawn. I can't begin to tell you what the ending of the story signifies,but oddly, that's perfectly okay. Expected, even.

Some of Link's stories circle back upon themselves with a self-referential postmodern glee (the closing story "Lull" in particular); other times they come untethered and float (or run, or drive) away. But at the center there is always a hint of darkness, of things lost, loneliness, the self-consciousness of the outsider or the obsessive. It's Link's potent mixture of cleverness, whimsy and pathos that makes her stories not only odd, but oddly moving.


* Not that there's anything wrong with a big, juicy trilogy -- or even more, say ASoIaF. It just seems these days it's expected that every book written need be the first in a series. Sometimes one book is the exact perfect number of books.