A big THANK YOU shout out to the fine folks at the Vestavia Hills Library in the Forest for hosting and feeding us this morning! The next RART meeting will be on Wednesday, December 9th at
9am at the Hoover Library for a discussion of nonfiction in the very broad
topics of history, biographies, and social issues. Today we met to scare ourselves with
mysteries, thrillers, and horror novels.
A spooky time was had by all!
In attendance:
Holley, EOL
Terri, VH
Mary Anne, Central SH
David, Central Fic
Kelly, SR
Samuel, SR
Jon, AV
In attendance:
Holley, EOL
Terri, VH
Mary Anne, Central SH
David, Central Fic
Kelly, SR
Samuel, SR
Jon, AV
Eight year old Merry Barrett is *pretty* sure her sister
Marjorie is faking it but as the doctors are unable to halt or even slow
Marjorie’s descent into madness and her father begins to talk about devils and
demons, contacting a local Catholic priest for help, Merry becomes unsure. Adding to the chaos, her financially strapped
parents agree to be filmed for The Possession, a hit reality tv show. From there, things become increasingly
confusing, scary, and dangerous for Merry and her family. As a writer interviews a grown up Merry about
those long ago events, it’s difficult for Merry and the reader to distinguish
between reality and reality television.
Goosebumps abound! Content alert:
cursing, sexual violence, terror
Holley, Emmet O’Neal
Holley, Emmet O’Neal
The summer of 1976 is the hottest on record when Christopher
Norton , his wife Laura, and their infant daughter Faye settle into their new
(to them) Victorian fixer upper. They’ve
sunk all their cash into making this their home but the edges of life quickly
begin to fray. It begins with the baby
monitor: the flat crackle of silence broken first by a knocking sound. Then come the voices. Laura is terrified, but Christopher is
intrigued. A composer of film
soundtracks by trade, he soon abandons his work for the project of a lifetime –
a symphony incorporating the voices he records late at night. Laura begins having nightmares about a
shadowy room full of bloody instruments of torture resounding with the cries of
her own child and begs Christopher to stop his project. Of course he doesn’t, and the voices are free
now and demand to be heard. Content
alert: sexual situations, violence
GENERAL DISCUSSION: (from the website) “Movie Morlocks isthe official blog for Turner Classic Movies. No topic is too obscure or niche
to be excluded from our film discussions.”
There have been several intriguing posts about horror movies this month.
“But look at
these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor
ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish
cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such
places, and none the wiser.”
---Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure
of the Copper Beeches,” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The
Doyle quotation above kept occurring to me as I listened to The Little Stranger. The idea of what can happen in isolated
locales is a motif of literary forms from the “cozy” mystery to the nightmarish
horror novel. Stranger is somewhere
in between: if you imagine a haunted house novel written by Rosamund Pilcher
you’ll have a pretty good idea of the atmosphere.
The
protagonist and point of view character is Doctor Faraday, who from his youth
has been fascinated by Hundreds Hall, an estate in the English countryside
where his mother worked as one of the maids. When he is an adult with his own
medical practice in the area, he is called in by the family to treat the minor
illness of one of the young housemaids; from there, his friendship with the
family takes off until he is practically one of them. But peculiar things begin
to happen at Hundreds. The friendly family dog savages a child during a house
party. The son, who was injured in World War II and still suffering somewhat
from PTSD, begins to have terrifying hallucinations—are they hallucinations?—and has to be committed to a mental
institution. There are strange noises: sounds of breathing over the old
pneumatic speaking tube that was once used for summoning servants from
downstairs, mysterious flutterings as if a bird were trapped in one of the
chimneys. Dark, smoky markings appear at random on the walls. As tensions mount
and incidents increase, changing from peculiar or mysterious to destructive and
terrifying, Doctor Faraday watches in dismay, wondering how . . . or if . . .
he can assist the family.
Choosing
the audio version of this novel was a good decision for me. Simon Vance is an
excellent reader and his perfect “received pronunciation” voice and diction
were a perfect fit for a novel set in the English countryside. He manages all
the character voices well, male and female, but he was especially effective in
conveying the pathos and helplessness of Doctor Faraday as he is caught up in
the fate of Hundreds Hall. Listening to the audio also made it impossible for
me to skim over any parts of the novel that I might have wanted to skip, and
kept me from turning to the end—and this is one of those books where nothing is
certain until the very last page. So if you’d like a change from “house that
dripped blood because of the mad slasher” novels and would prefer something
more quietly creepy, try The Little
Stranger.
Mary Anne, Central-Southern History
In
the world of scary plots, it seems that every once in a while someone should listen when they’re warned away from a
certain person, place, or thing. Don’t speak to him—don’t go there—don’t touch
that. But horror novels are full of people who can’t take this advice, and the
protagonist of Song of Kali is no
exception. Robert Luczak, a writer for Harper’s
magazine, accepts an assignment to travel to Calcutta, India, in hopes of
locating an Indian poet who has been missing and believed dead for several
years. His former boss warns him away from Calcutta in the strongest possible
terms, but Bobby, in the great tradition of protagonists who don’t listen, goes
to Calcutta, taking along his wife and baby daughter. What develops from there
is an extremely tense novel that was not exactly the nail-biting terror-fest
the reviews had led me to believe, but was disturbing in that quiet way that
makes you keep thinking about it long after you’ve finished. I had listened to
audio versions of some of Simmons’ longer novels (Hyperion and The Terror)
and I was curious to see if he could bring the unease in a shorter novel. He
does not disappoint; from the moment I learned that one of the earlier names
for Calcutta was Kaliksetra—“the place of Kali”—I knew that Bobby Luczak was in
for a world of trouble and should have stayed at home. If you’re planning a vacation
in Calcutta you might want to read Song
of Kali first so you can be the protagonist who actually listens to good
advice.
Mary Anne, Central-Southern History
(powells) The men on board HMS Terror have every expectation
of finding the Northwest Passage. When the expedition's leader, Sir John
Franklin, meets a terrible death, Captain Francis Crozier takes command and
leads his surviving crewmen on a last, desperate attempt to flee south across
the ice. But as another winter approaches, as scurvy and starvation grow more
terrible, and as the Terror on the ice stalks them southward, Crozier and his
men begin to fear there is no escape. A haunting, gripping story based on
actual historical events, The Terror is a novel that will chill you to your
core.
Jon, Avondale
Jon, Avondale
GENERAL DISCUSSION:
-history.com, “Ship From Doomed Arctic Expedition Found After 170 Years”
-ottawacitizen.com, “Franklin ship discovery solves ‘one of Canada’s great mysteries’”
The Cut by George Pelecanos
(powells) Since he got home from Iraq, Spero Lucas has
carved out a good life for himself, enjoying his youth and his independence,
and making a name as the kind of person who gets jobs done quietly and
effectively, usually just on the right side of the law. A quick case for a
criminal defense attorney leads him into the world of a high-profile marijuana
dealer, currently in prison but with a long reach, who wants to find out who's
been stealing from his dealers. Soon Lucas uncovers a tangle of connections
that lead dangerously close to some people in high places — and to Lucas's own
family.
Jon, Avondale
Jon, Avondale
Epitaph: A Novel of the OK Corral by Mary Doria Russell
(powells) Mary Doria Russell has unearthed the Homeric
tragedy buried beneath 130 years of mythology, misrepresentation, and sheer
indifference to fact. Epic and intimate, Epitaph gives voice to the
real men and women whose lives were changed forever by those fatal thirty
seconds in Tombstone. At its heart is the woman behind the myth: Josephine
Sarah Marcus, who loved Wyatt Earp for almost half a century and who carefully
chipped away at the truth until she had crafted the heroic legend that would
become the epitaph she believed her husband deserved.
Jon, Avondale
Jon, Avondale
Notes From the Internet Apocalypse by Wayne Gladstone
(powells) When the Internet suddenly stops working, society
reels from the loss of flowing data and streaming entertainment. Addicts wander
the streets talking to themselves in 140 characters or forcing cats to perform
tricks for their amusement, while the truly desperate pin their requests for
casual encounters on public bulletin boards. The economy tumbles and the
government passes the draconian NET Recovery Act.
For Gladstone, the Nets disappearance comes particularly
hard, following the loss of his wife, leaving his flask of Jamesons and
grandfathers fedora as the only comforts in his Brooklyn apartment. But there
are rumors that someone in New York is still online. Someone set apart from
this new world where Facebook flirters "poke" each other in real life
and members of Anonymous trade memes at secret parties. Where a former
librarian can sell information as a human search engine and the perverted fulfill
their secret fetishes at the blossoming Rule 34 club. With the help of his
friends---a blogger and a webcam girl, both now out of work---Gladstone sets
off to find the Internet. But is he the right man to save humanity from this
Apocalypse?
For those of you wondering if you have WiFi right now, Wayne
Gladstone's Notes from the Internet Apocalypse examines the question
"What is life without the Web?"
Samuel, Springville Road
Samuel, Springville Road
NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
(powells) NOS4A2 is a spine-tingling novel of
supernatural suspense from master of horror Joe Hill, the New York Times bestselling
author of Heart-Shaped Box and Horns.
Victoria McQueen has a secret gift for finding things: a
misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. On
her Raleigh Tuff Burner bike, she makes her way to a rickety covered bridge
that, within moments, takes her wherever she needs to go, whether it's across
Massachusetts or across the country.
Charles Talent Manx has a way with children. He likes to
take them for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the NOS4A2 vanity
plate. With his old car, he can slip right out of the everyday world, and onto
the hidden roads that transport them to an astonishing — and terrifying —
playground of amusements he calls “Christmasland.”
Then, one day, Vic goes looking for trouble — and finds
Manx. That was a lifetime ago. Now Vic, the only kid to ever escape Manx's
unmitigated evil, is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx
never stopped thinking about Victoria McQueen. Hes on the road again and he's
picked up a new passenger: Vic's own son.
Samuel, Springville Road
Samuel, Springville Road
This Green Hell by Greig Beck (#3 in the Arcadian Genesis
series)
(powells) Deep in the steaming jungles of Paraguay, Aimee
Weir is in trouble. The petrobiologist has found what she was looking for, a
unique microorganism in a natural gas deposit, but it proves to be more
destructive than anyone could have imagined. A contagion is striking down all
in its wake. The camp is quarantined, but workers start to vanish in the night.
Alex Hunter, code name Arcadian, and his Hotzone All-Forces Warfare Commandos
must be dropped in to the disaster area to do whatever it takes to stem the
outbreak. It has been a year since Aimee has seen Alex; she thought she had
left him for good. Now she needs him more than ever. But can he survive long
enough to confront the danger that threatens the very survival of mankind?
Samuel, Springville Road
Death of a Pirate King by Josh Lanyon (#4 in the Adrien
English series)
(joshlanyon.com) Gay bookseller and reluctant amateur sleuth
Adrien English's writing career is suddenly taking off. His first novel, Murder
Will Out, has been optioned by notorious Hollywood actor Paul Kane. When murder
makes an appearance at a movie studio dinner party, who should be called in but
Adrien's former lover, handsome closeted detective Jake Riordan now a
Lieutenant with LAPD. This may just
drive Adrien's new boyfriend, sexy UCLA professor Guy Snowden, to commit a
murder of his own.
Samuel, Springville Road
Samuel, Springville Road
Mile 81 by Stephen King
Well, you expect “creepy as all hell” from King, and he
doesn’t disappoint with this simple little tale of a young lad being where he’s
not supposed to be and a strange vehicle that gobbles Good Samaritans like cheese
puffs. Combine a young boy who’s been
told he’s not old enough to tag along with his brother’s ‘gang’, a derelict highway food strip just itching to
be daringly explored, and an old, muddy car that pulls into the breakdown lane
with King’s evil genius and you’ve got
the makings for a bloody disaster and an unlikely set of heroes. This is a good read for when you aren’t
planning a road trip where you might have to stop at abandoned rest areas in
the foreseeable future.
Kelly, Springville Road
Kelly, Springville Road
Vampires are unliving in the tunnels beneath Manhattan in
the 1970’s, and they have a pretty tight confederation, ruled by the autocratic
Irishwoman, Margaret. Her one-time
victim Joey Peacock, whom she turned several decades before when he was 14, is
now her ally. One of Margaret’s rules
is that the group is to “fly under the radar” and avoid conflict with the
living; therefore they seldom kill their victims. Another rule is absolute intolerance of
anything that threatens the group.
One night, Joey happens upon a bunch of little undead
kids. They’re using vampiric charm on a
father-looking fellow, who unwisely follows them off the train. They don’t seem to understand that leaving
dead, drained bodies around and calling attention to themselves is a bad thing,
and Joey assumes they just need to learn the ropes. He tries to intercede and to convince the
other vampires that they should be adopted and brought up in the way they
should go, but things go seriously wrong in his plan.
Kelly, Springville Road
Kelly, Springville Road
The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz (#4 in
Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series)
(powells) She is the girl with the dragon tattoo — a genius
hacker and uncompromising misfit. He is a crusading journalist whose
championing of the truth often brings him to the brink of prosecution.
Late one night, Blomkvist receives a phone call from a
source claiming to have information vital to the United States. The source has
been in contact with a young female superhacker — a hacker resembling someone
Blomkvist knows all too well. The implications are staggering. Blomkvist, in
desperate need of a scoop for Millennium, turns to Salander for help. She,
as usual, has her own agenda. The secret they are both chasing is at the center
of a tangled web of spies, cybercriminals, and governments around the world,
and someone is prepared to kill to protect it...
The duo who captivated millions of readers in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl WhoKicked the Hornet's Nest join forces again in this adrenaline-charged,
uniquely of-the-moment thriller.
David, Central-Fiction
David, Central-Fiction
What She Left Behind by Ellen Marie Wiseman
(amazon) In this stunning new novel, the acclaimed author of
The Plum Tree merges the past and present into a haunting story about the
nature of love and loyalty--and the lengths we will go to protect those who
need us most.
Ten years ago, Izzy Stone's mother fatally shot her father while he slept. Devastated by her mother's apparent insanity, Izzy, now seventeen, refuses to visit her in prison. But her new foster parents, employees at the local museum, have enlisted Izzy's help in cataloging items at a long-shuttered state asylum. There, amid piles of abandoned belongings, Izzy discovers a stack of unopened letters, a decades-old journal, and a window into her own past.
Clara Cartwright, eighteen years old in 1929, is caught between her overbearing parents and her love for an Italian immigrant. Furious when she rejects an arranged marriage, Clara's father sends her to a genteel home for nervous invalids. But when his fortune is lost in the stock market crash, he can no longer afford her care--and Clara is committed to the public asylum.
Even as Izzy deals with the challenges of yet another new beginning, Clara's story keeps drawing her into the past. If Clara was never really mentally ill, could something else explain her own mother's violent act? Piecing together Clara's fate compels Izzy to re-examine her own choices--with shocking and unexpected results.
Illuminating and provocative, What She Left Behind is a masterful novel about the yearning to belong--and the mysteries that can belie even the most ordinary life.
Terri, Vestavia
Ten years ago, Izzy Stone's mother fatally shot her father while he slept. Devastated by her mother's apparent insanity, Izzy, now seventeen, refuses to visit her in prison. But her new foster parents, employees at the local museum, have enlisted Izzy's help in cataloging items at a long-shuttered state asylum. There, amid piles of abandoned belongings, Izzy discovers a stack of unopened letters, a decades-old journal, and a window into her own past.
Clara Cartwright, eighteen years old in 1929, is caught between her overbearing parents and her love for an Italian immigrant. Furious when she rejects an arranged marriage, Clara's father sends her to a genteel home for nervous invalids. But when his fortune is lost in the stock market crash, he can no longer afford her care--and Clara is committed to the public asylum.
Even as Izzy deals with the challenges of yet another new beginning, Clara's story keeps drawing her into the past. If Clara was never really mentally ill, could something else explain her own mother's violent act? Piecing together Clara's fate compels Izzy to re-examine her own choices--with shocking and unexpected results.
Illuminating and provocative, What She Left Behind is a masterful novel about the yearning to belong--and the mysteries that can belie even the most ordinary life.
Terri, Vestavia
Live Bait by Cameron Pierce
Live Bait is a novella about the strangest apocalypse I have
ever read about. I quite enjoyed it but I may never go fishing again, and I
certainly will never go fishing with a drunk or while drunk or with a crazy
person.
Mondretta, Leeds
Mondretta, Leeds
GENERAL DISCUSSION: We all agreed that is best to follow up
scary and disturbing with a chaser of funny.
Here are some nonfiction books that deal with weighty topics with just
the right touch of humor while still being respectful of the subject.
(powells) When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted
was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father
and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for
Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we
are all the better for it.
In the irreverent Let's Pretend This Never Happened,
Lawson's long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the
surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments — the ones we want to
pretend never happened — are the very same moments that make us the people we
are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to
think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and
hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives.
Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things by Jenny
Lawson
(powells) In Let's Pretend This Never Happened, Jenny
Lawson baffled readers with stories about growing up the daughter of a
taxidermist. In her new book, Furiously Happy, Jenny explores her lifelong
battle with mental illness. A hysterical, ridiculous book about crippling
depression and anxiety? That sounds like a terrible idea. And terrible ideas
are what Jenny does best.
According to Jenny: "Some people might think that being
'furiously happy' is just an excuse to be stupid and irresponsible and invite a
herd of kangaroos over to your house without telling your husband first because
you suspect he would say no since he's never particularly liked kangaroos. And
that would be ridiculous because no one would invite a herd of kangaroos into
their house. Two is the limit. I speak from personal experience. My husband
says that none is the new limit. I say he should have been clearer about that
before I rented all those kangaroos."
"Most of my favorite people are dangerously fucked-up
but you'd never guess because we've learned to bare it so honestly that it
becomes the new normal. Like John Hughes wrote in The Breakfast Club,
'We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it.' Except go
back and cross out the word 'hiding.'"
Jenny's first book, Let's Pretend This Never Happened,
was ostensibly about family, but deep down it was about celebrating your own
weirdness. Furiously Happy is a book about mental illness, but under
the surface it's about embracing joy in fantastic and outrageous ways — and who
doesn't need a bit more of that?
(powells) In her first memoir, Roz Chast brings her
signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of
their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents,
and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both
comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of
elderly parents.
When it came to her elderly mother and father, Roz held to
the practices of denial, avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast
climbed a ladder to locate an old souvenir from the “crazy closet” — with
predictable results — the tools that had served Roz well through her parents
seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties could no longer be deployed.
While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies
— an anxious father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he
slipped into dementia and a former assistant principal mother whose overbearing
personality had sidelined Roz for decades — the themes are universal: adult
children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents leaving a family
home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies; managing
logistics; and hiring strangers to provide the most personal care.
An amazing portrait of two lives at their end and an only
child coping as best she can, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant will
show the full range of Roz Chast's talent as cartoonist and storyteller.
