Review 2687: The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

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In terms of the horror story it’s labeled as, The Empusium may end like one, but it spends more time building up to its climax than on the horrible part. Or maybe horror is the attitudes toward women expressed by the men.

Mieczyslaw Woznicz is a very young Polish engineering student who arrives in a remote mountainous town in Silesia for treatment for tuberculosis in the early 20th century. He is staying in the guesthouse for gentlemen until he gets a place in the sanatorium. The guesthouse is run by Willi Opitz and his wife, but his wife dies almost immediately on Woznicz’s arrival.

I don’t know if it’s helpful from the beginning to understand what empusa are or not. I had to look it up. but from the beginning we are occasionally reminded that someone is watching everything. Still, this is something I tended to forget.

A lot of the novel deals with Woznicz’s sense of unfitness and inferiority, which has been enforced by his father’s constant expression of disappointment in him. But we also get to read lots of philosophical discussions among the men, which always end in misogyny.

Occasionally, readers are told a lot of bizarre folklore or visit some unusual site in the forest, and these incidents are leading up an annual fall event. Woznicz feels he has a shameful secret, but he’s going to learn more about himself by the end of the novel.

Tokarczuk is a writer whose books are totally different from each other. This one isn’t my favorite, but it is atmospheric and full of irony. It is said to share some characteristics, including plot points, with The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, a book I haven’t read.

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Review 2686: Death in Disguise

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The early programs of Midsomer Murders seem to have stuck fairly faithfully to the original novels. Luckily for my enjoyment, I haven’t remembered all the details. For this one, I thought I remembered who the killer was but got confused by details I forgot.

The novel begins with the death of James Carter, resident of the Lodge of the Golden Windhorse, who has fallen down the stairs. The death is found to be accidental.

As in the previous books, Graham takes her time developing the setting and characters before getting to the crime. We return to the Lodge of the Golden Windhorse, a commune espousing concepts derived, sort of, from various religions and even folklore. There we meet a collection of eccentrics, some of them “mystics,” under the leadership of the Master. Although the Master may very well be truly devout, Graham has a lot of fun with these characters.

A major event is taking place. Sylvia, now named Suhami, is the daughter of a filthy (in more ways that one) rich businessman, Guy Gamelin. And he is a brute, but he adores his daughter. Suhami, though, has been hiding from him at the commune. But it is her birthday, the day she comes into a huge trust fund. She wants to give it to the commune, but the Master has talked her into seeing her parents and has invited them to her birthday party. Guy hasn’t even told his wife, Felicity, about the invitation, and he shows up early hoping to see Sylvia. But Suhami refuses, so he goes back to his hotel and essentially rapes another commune visitor, Trixie.

That night Trixie isn’t at the party, but the other members are. They are May and Arno, two older residents (Arno is madly in love with May); Ken and Heather, an ineffectual married couple; Janet, an older woman with a crush on young Trixie; Christopher, a photographer and recent arrival who is courting Suhami; Tom, a mentally challenged or mentally ill (Graham’s characters seem to confuse the two) young man who worships the Master; and the Master himself. Felicity shows up late blotto with drugs.

During a regression to Roman Britain by May, she has a strong reaction that makes everyone panic. When she is revived, they all see that the Master has been stabbed to death. Barnaby is put on the case.

Barnaby is dismayed by how the different pieces of information fail to lead anywhere. Most of the commune members think Guy Gamelin murdered the Master, but Barnaby is not so sure. In any case, Guy dies of a heart attack that night.

Fairly early on, Barnaby finds out that Christopher is using someone else’s name, because the actual photographer of that name gets engaged to a socialite. “Christopher” explains that he is really Andrew Carter, the nephew of the man who fell down the stairs months before. He has come to investigate, thinking there has been foul play.

Although Graham has a lot of fun at the expense of advocates of New Age ideas (not real ones, I don’t think), she provides an epilogue that is more forgiving. Except for one too many fat jokes (told by the vile Sergeant Troy, of course), I found this one entertaining.

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Review 2685: The Marlow Murder Club

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For some reason, I thought I had read The Marlow Murder Club until I began watching the series on TV. Then I realized I hadn’t.

It begins when Judith Potts, a widow in her 70s who lives on the Thames, is skinny dipping (I believe Brits call it “wild swimming”) near the house of her neighbor, Stefan Dunwoody. She hears someone shout and then a gunshot. She tries to pull herself into a blue canoe at the bank but is unable to, so she returns home and calls the police. They find nothing, and no one appears to be at home. But later, Judith returns to Stefan’s property and finds him near the water, shot in the head.

Detective Sergeant Tanika Malik isn’t quite ready to admit foul play. Perhaps Stefan committed suicide and his gun fell into the water. Judith, we learn, is a crossword setter, so she’s not about to abandon a puzzle. She finds out that Stefan had a dispute with Elliot Howard, an antiques dealer, and was threatening him with the police, although some people seem to believe it’s Stefan who is crooked, not Elliot. In trying to learn more about Elliot, Judith goes to the church, where she meets Becks Starling, the vicar’s wife.

Then another man is killed, Iqbal Kassam, a taxi driver. One murder in Marlow is unusual, two unheard of. Judith thinks they may be linked, especially as there are similarities. At the scene, she meets Suzie Harris, Iqbal’s dog walker. Soon, the three women team up to find the killer.

This novel moves along well enough, but I thought it was just okay. I had a few problems with details—for one thing, why no one could figure out a way to get around a downed tree except pulling it when there was an emergency—climb over it maybe and use someone else’s car to continue? And although the writing was okay, I spotted a couple of redundancies within a short period. I figured out the solution well before the end of the book, and I noticed that at the end, no one had told Suzie what happened, but she behaved as if they had. That is, the author didn’t catch this. Or the editor, maybe.

So, I say ho hum. But short, zippy chapters, sure to appeal to many readers.

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Review 2684: Wolfe Island

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For quite a while, I wasn’t sure whether Wolfe Island is a contemporary novel or a dystopian one set in the near future. Eventually, it became clear that it is dystopian. It was published in 2019, but we are so much nearer now to its reality that it’s scary.

Kitty Hawke has lived on Wolfe Island in Chesapeake Bay almost all her life. It was once thriving, the home of watermen and their families and summer tourists. Now, with the rising waters, she is the only person left. She is an artist who makes sculptures out of found objects, and her only company is her wolf-dog Girl. All the houses on the island but hers are ruins.

Kitty tried to live off the island when she married Hart, but away from the marshes she couldn’t create, and she felt like an outsider. Once her daughter Claudie was a teenager, she left her family to return to the island, causing a break with Claudie.

During a storm, some people arrive on the island, three teenagers—two boys and a girl—and a little girl. Kitty recognizes the teenage girl as one who asked her questions when a school field trip came to the island. It turns out, she is Kitty’s granddaughter Cat, whom Kitty has never met. With her are her boyfriend Josh and Luis, a Hispanic young man, and his little sister Alejandra. Cat explains that she and Josh illegally drive people north, but they need to lie low for a while.

Luis and Alejandra are illegal aliens. Their father disappeared and their mother has been arrested. They are trying to find their mother, in a climate where ordinary citizens are challenging people to produce their papers and men are running around shooting anyone who looks foreign. Rising waters have ruined the soil of many farms, places are abandoned, and people are flocking north.

The young people move into a nearby house, and they stay there for several months while Cat is pregnant and eventually has the baby. But soon afterward, it becomes clear that someone has found them.

This is a really engaging and occasionally exciting novel. I’m having to eat my words about being sick of dystopian novels, as two of the best novels I read lately are dystopian, and this is one of them.

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14th Anniversary! Top Ten Books of the Year!

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It’s hard to believe that yesterday was the 14th anniversary of my blog. As has become my habit, this is the time that I list my favorite books of the ones I reviewed during the year. As usual, I make my list from the Best of Ten books during the year.

This year was a tough one to pick, because I had twelve books that were difficult to choose among, along with all the other Best of Tens. I ended up with three or four fairly recent books and five or six classic novels, one comic novel, three novels about the course of the main character’s childhood and life, four historical novels and one partially historical, one nonfiction memoir, one mystery, and one drama with a twist. Three were by men, and seven by women. Two of these books were re-reads for me.

So, here they are, in the order I reviewed them:

Review 2683: Hex

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I actually read Hex for Novellas in November but somehow forgot to schedule it for November. Oh well.

It seems I have been reading the Darkland Tales series in order without even knowing it existed. I read the first, Rizzio by Denise Mina, because I usually read everything by her. Hex is the second.

Darkland Tales is a series of retellings of incidents in Scottish history, written by well-known Scottish writers. In this case, Hex is about the hanging of Geillis Duncan (not the Outlander Geillis Duncan) as a witch in 1591 Edinburgh.

The story begins with a witch from 2021 using a seance to visit Geillis in her cell the night before her execution. Iris, the real witch, is determined that Geillis will not spend her last night alone. Geillis is a young housemaid, a healer who has fallen afoul of her master’s plot to steal the inheritance of his wealthy sister-in-law.

This story interprets the witchcraft trials as misogyny, which they were, and so its two main characters express a great deal of the opposite. This work is symbolic and poetic, sometimes a little too abstract for me, but also angry. It’s powerful.

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Review 2682: The Woman in the Hall

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Molly and Jay Blake have led a straitened but normal childhood until Jay is hospitalized and needs care that Lorna Blake cannot afford. So, she has Molly dress in her shabby gym dress and takes her to beg at a rich person’s house. Molly is mortified. Lorna has an unusual relationship with her servant, Susan, and we understand from a conversation that this is not the first time Lorna has done this.

Jay recovers and life returns to normal. However, periodically Lorna gets restless and begins approaching rich people, telling them outrageous stories and usually coming away with money. She is a professional con woman who uses the excuse of needing money for her daughters, when she is clearly excited by this life. In fact, in some way she makes herself believe her lies. For example, years after she lies about Jay wanting to play the violin, she says that Jay used to beg her for luxuries, including the violin. In fact, both girls are horrified by their mother’s behavior and seldom ask for anything.

Lorna has done things in the past that have made her enemies. Captain Alexander Muir-Leslie’s engagement to Sylvia, whom he adores, is broken when he tries to convince her that Lorna cheated her. So, he begins trying to track Lorna down. He travels to America because Lorna has told people that her husband, Neil Inglefield, deserted her and her daughters. But Neil Inglefield is her stepbrother, not her husband. In company with his friend, Shirley Dennison, whose romance with Neil’s brother Lorna broke up years ago, Neil sets out to find Lorna. Instead, he finds Molly.

The first part of the novel, dealing with the girl’s earlier lives, seemed to me to become a bit repetitive after a while, as Lorna pulls her cons and then turns her stories back on her children to justify herself. Later, with the introduction of Muir-Leslie, the novel begins to be more about the effects on other people’s lives of her lies. This change immediately made the novel more interesting, culminating in a grotesque betrayal of one of her daughters.

I’ve always been interested in novels about sociopaths, and Lorna is an early portrayal. Also, the words “child abuse” are never spoken, and perhaps in 1939 Lorna’s behavior wouldn’t be understood that way, but it is now. This novel is a compelling character study. There are characters to like in this novel, but Lorna isn’t one of them.

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Review 2681: A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth

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A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth is a collection of short stories that I read for my Pulitzer Prize project. I sometimes have problems reading short stories, but I found most of these engrossing. Most of them were about scientific curiosity and the characters’ actual or potential legacy.

“Death of the Pugilist, or the Famous Battle of Jacob Burke & Blindman McGraw” is set during the early 19th century. It is about how a burly lad becomes a prize fighter. These were the days of no-holds-barred bare-knuckle fights.

Another historical story, “The Ecstasy of Alfred Russel Wallace,” is about an early collector of bug specimens who begins to draw conclusions similar to Darwin’s about the survival of the fittest. He writes to Darwin hoping for a scholarly exchange, but perhaps Darwin is worried about which of them thought of the theory first. This one has really beautiful prose.

“For the Union Dead” is a contemporary story about the narrator’s uncle, who became involved in Civil War re-enactments.

“The Second Doctor Service” is a letter to a medical journal from a 19th century man who begins having periods of blackouts and thinks another self is trying to take him over.

“The Miraculous Discovery of Psammetichus I” is based on a story by Herodotus. It’s a series of descriptions of experiments supposedly performed by a curious Pharoah, most of which involve having children raised by animals.

“On Growing Ferns and Other Plants in Glass Cases, in the Midst of the Smoke of London” is set in the 19th century during the height of the industrial revolution and major air pollution. A widow’s young son begins suffering from severe asthma, and the doctors fail to treat it successfully. She eventually gets a better idea.

“The Line Agent Pascal” is set in the 19th century South American jungle. Pascal is a telegraph operator who likes the isolation of his position but forms a sort of family with the other operators. There is one in particular whom he has never met but for whom he feels an affinity.

“On the Cause of Winds and Waves, &c” is a letter to her sister by a 19th century balloonist in France. Observing a strange phenomenon in the heavens, she is asked to report about it to the scientific Académie, but she doesn’t realize she has only been asked to be ridiculed.

“A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth” is a record by a man who has been incarcerated in an insane asylum but is probably OCD or on the spectrum instead of insane.

Most of these stories have some kind of uplifting ending. Maybe I enjoyed them so much because many of them felt like short historical novels. I liked them a lot.

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