This meeting was so good, it was scary!
Okay, that's a bit melodramatic but it was a fantastic meeting! The topic was scary books, but the variety of topics that can be creepy is vast and that vastness was well represented by roundtable participants. For even MORE scary titles, Friend "JCPLA Reader's Advisory Roundtable" on Facebook and look for the relevant wall post!
I’ll take just a minute to note that the December meeting, originally scheduled
for December 8th, will go through both a date and venue change. I’ll get that information out just as soon as I get some firm plans in place!
On to the list:
Kiss the Girls by James Patterson
Sally, Hoover
Still Missing by Chevy Stevens
Sally, Hoover
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Gina, Gardendale
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Gina, Gardendale
Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King
Gina, Gardendale
The Passage by Justin Cronin
Mondretta, Leeds
House of Reckoning by John Saul
Mondretta, Leeds
The Red Tree by Caitlin Kiernan
Alabama connection: the author was born in Dublin, Ireland but her family moved to Leeds, Alabama when she was a small girl and then to Trussville during her teen years.
The Red Tree is a mind-blowing blend of pseudo-reality and fiction. It is a story within a story within a story, maybe one more story on top of that. For lack of a better term, the “foreword” is an editor’s letter relating how she came to acquire and publish the manuscript that follows. The manuscript author, Sarah, was supposed to have been working on a novel, but the manuscript, Sarah’s diary in the months before her suicide, is apparently the only work she did. Sarah’s diary follows the editor’s letter. Sarah is a coming-up-on-middle-age author, possibly suffering from burn out, from a small Alabama town who has arrived on this New England farm seeking a respite from the grief of the death of her lover, Amanda. While exploring the house’s cellar, she finds an old typewriter and a manuscript written by the house’s former tenant. He chronicles the myths and legends surrounding a creepy, rather sinister tree on the property. As Sarah reads his research and makes her own journey out to see the supposedly evil tree, the root of obsession takes hold and her life quickly spirals out of control. The Red Tree takes its pace from its name. Slow, steady, resolute, unstoppable dread looms over the reader and never lets go. No monsters jump out of dark alcoves, no undead lumber across the old farmhouse’s wooden floors, but the monsters of the mind prove more dangerous than any that could have trod the ground anyway.
Holley, Emmet O’Neal
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
This book was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize, eventually losing out to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. A novel just as much about the ghost of the aristocracy as it may be about ghosts in the shadowed corridors of Hundreds Hall, The Little Stranger has a wonderfully gothic feel and tone. Dr. Faraday’s mother was a maid at Hundreds Hall and he has always considered it a nearly hallowed place, a residence to envy and covet. He has overcome those humble beginnings to become the town physician and finally gets a call from the stately old manor. The young servant girl will tell him little except that there is something wrong, something bad, in the house and it doesn’t like her to be there. Dismissing her complaints as childish fancies, Dr. Faraday makes excuses for her to the matron of the household, Mrs. Ayers, and her daughter, Caroline. Caroline takes Dr. Faraday into her confidences concerning her brother Roderick, recovering from injuries he received in WWII. She details her brother’s erratic behavior and paranoia and Dr. Faraday agrees to treat him. As his association with this once affluent family becomes closer, Dr. Faraday struggles with his dedication to science and begins to wonder whether childish fancies are all that is going on a Hundreds Hall or if something truly is wrong there, something bad, something evil.
Holley, Emmet O’Neal
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
Jason, Trussville
Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves by Zampano
Jason, Trussville
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
Jason, Trussville
Horns by Joe Hill
Theresa, Hoover
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Ellen, Avondale
Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen by David J. Skal
Ellen, Avondale
Sundays with Vlad: From Pennsylvania to Transylvania, One Man's Quest to Live in the World of the Undead by Paul Bibeau
The subtitle is a bit dramatic because what he is actually trying to do is find out how a medieval prince became the most famous symbol of horror in the world, EVER. Some of what he finds we've all seen before, like Vlad's family life and the coincidence of the Dracul last name but some of the gems Bibeau teases from the Dracula legacy are real treasures. I have never read such a good, concise survey of the current trends in today’s vampire communities. I also have no idea if it is an exhaustive study, but it seems fairly thorough. I'd never heard of most of these people or groups and it makes me wonder which might be active here. Some drink blood, others only take in psychic energy, if the stories are to be believed, but all are very, very secretive. Also, I found Bibeau to be HiLaRiOuS! He has a description of Keanu Reeves' fame for unemotional acting that had me ROLLING! He also describes his attempts to get into a pair of plastic pants for a vampire party and other equally amusing tales that keep you reading well into the night. This blend of history and humor was a real treat and I heartily suggest it. I think it would make a great, interesting book group choice at Halloween so I'm keeping it on my radar to suggest to my own book group when the time comes. It also reminded me that I have never, ever read Bram Stoker's Dracula and that I should ASAP.
Holley, Emmet O’Neal
The Fall by Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan
Jonathan, Avondale
Floating Dragon by Peter Straub
Jonathan, Avondale
Armageddon's Children by Terry Brooks
Jonathan, Avondale
The Stand by Stephen King
Jonathan, Avondale
Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
Jonathan, Avondale
Sometimes, the classic, tried & true of a master like Stephen King cannot be trumped. His second book, 'Salem's Lot was about the slow takeover of an small town called Jerusalem's Lot by a vampire patterned after Bram Stoker's Dracula and has two elements that he also uses to good effect in later novels: a small American town, usually in Maine, where people are disconnected from each other, quietly nursing their potential for evil; and a mixed bag of rational, goodhearted people, including a writer, who band together to fight that evil. Simply taken as a contemporary vampire novel, 'Salem's Lot is great fun to read, and has been very influential in the horror genre. No one who has ever read about the vampires that float up to scratch on their potential victims windows will forget that image. But this title is also a sly piece of social commentary. As King said in 1983, "In 'Salem's Lot, the thing that really scared me was not vampires, but the town in the daytime, the town that was empty, knowing that there were things in closets, that there were people tucked under beds, under the concrete pilings of all those trailers. And all the time I was writing that, the Watergate hearings were pouring out of the TV.... Howard Baker kept asking, 'What I want to know is, what did you know and when did you know it?' That line haunts me, it stays in my mind.... During that time I was thinking about secrets, things that have been hidden and were being dragged out into the light."
Leslie, Vestavia
Directive 51 by John Barnes
Jonathan, Avondale
Dust by Charles Pellegrino
Jonathan, Avondale
World War Z by Max Brooks
Jonathan, Avondale
The Deadliest Strain by Jan Coffey
Jonathan, Avondale
Faithless by Karin Slaughter
Slaughter's dark, forensic-driven Grant County series of crime novels has always drawn a thin line between the members of the law-enforcement team and the victims of the crimes being investigated. The title of the fifth entry in the series reflects both the marital difficulties of coroner Sara Linton and her ex-husband, police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, and the label affixed to certain willful members
of a religious cult. Jeffrey makes a grisly discovery in the woods when he stumbles over a metal pipe. A young woman was buried alive in a wooden crate for several days and appears to have died of asphyxiation. But
Sara's autopsy reveals a far different scenario. Jeffrey and officer Lena Adams' investigation leads to a farm owned by the Church of the Greater Good, which appears to have used burial as a form of punishment before. Meanwhile, Lena finds her own sick relationship with an abusive lover mirrored in the marriage of a former cult member who has damning information but is too afraid to disclose it for fear of provoking another vicious beating from her husband. Slaughter cannily incorporates any number of women's issues--from the difficult work of rebuilding a ruined relationship to finally figuring out when to call it quits--within a
compulsively readable narrative. And for anyone with claustrophobia will be terrorized by descriptions of being buried alive for three days to “atone” for your sins. I was!!!
Leslie, Vestavia
Crashers by Dana Haynes
The premise is simple: a crack team of National Transportation Safety Board experts, nicknamed the Crashers, investigate airplane crashes. Normally they take months to sift through wreckage and evidence, but this time they have mere days: if they can’t figure out what and who brought down CascadeAir Flight 818, more planes will fall from the sky. The lead characters consist of a hotshot engineer, the voice-recorder specialist, the veteran pathologist, and so on. The cockpit recorder shows that everything was working fine up to the point where the co-pilot notices a signal for a catastrophic system failure and instantly the plane starts to shake itself to pieces. Part of the team wants to write the crash off to pilot error, but one character isn't quite ready to buy that explanation, as the behavior of the pilots doesn't fit for him. Focus starts to turn to the new generation of flight recorder on the plane, and the technical lead from the company is more than happy to show off the capabilities of the device. However, it could be that the device does more than just record, and that the tech lead is part of a larger terrorist plot that could have international ramifications. A solid debut guaranteed to make you think twice before getting on another plane!
Leslie, Vestavia
Room by Emma Donoghue
This book was shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, but lost out to Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question.
To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits. Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough...not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work. Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, ROOM is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.
This book was mentioned in the general discussion.
Book vs. movie showdown! Richard Preston’s Hot Zone vs. Outbreak! Read the book, then watch the similar-story movie. The movie is not an adaptation, but the two deal with a similar topic. Preston - scary (and not a little gross)...Outbreak - "and they all lived happily ever after."
Read scary!
Holley
